personal shopping

yesterday i started shopping for xmas
in earnest

not knowing what to buy for anyone
i resorted to the old tactic of walking through
random stores

it turned into a nasty day for it
with the wind whipping cold rain
through the south end

a few shops were ones i'd had
some success with in the past

others were stops i'd made purely on a
whim

and what struck me was how the people
working in the stores made sure to greet me
and say hi

of course it's not like they were busy
but because i'm such a sap
maybe i looked a little harder at their wares

[oh get your mind out of the gutter]

maybe i wanted to buy something
even if it didn't fit any of the checkboxes on the
list

because maybe it's a nice store
run by nice people and such things
should be
encouraged

and this is wholly different from
the impersonal
get me in
get me out
get me my stuff
experience that marks so much
of the shopping world

don't get me wrong
it's well known that i'm a big
fan of straightforwardness
and not of unnecessary niceties

but it strikes me that absent
that human interaction
the decision of whether or not to purchase something
becomes purely financial calculus

and maybe it should be you might say
and maybe you'd be right

but beyond the decision of buy or don't buy
this also affects whether people buy cheap products
or pay somewhat more for
quality
for good design

and perhaps by complicating the purchasing decision
so to speak
by adding another term into the equation

the whole function of consumer confidence
so important to us all
while remaining fickle and unknowable

is damped just a little

maybe being a savvy customer isn't the
end-all
maybe it's not so bad a thing to get sold

not in the sense of getting ripped off
but having the balance tipped to
'sure i want it'
rather than simply
'not at this price'

or maybe i'm just a pushover and am making
excuses