The Big Store

Posted on April 28, 2005 in Consuming

Large stores drive me crazy. All the merchandise stacked in bright piles, the endless searching on my own for the item that I want to buy while passing many items that I hadn’t thought of buying but do just because I see them. I feel it in both my head and my wallet. Down this aisle might be something I covet, so I go there and just look at it, pulling it out and measuring its feel in my hands, its dimensions in my eye.

The modern “we have it all store” is miles of rows. All that color gets into my head, beguiles me. The hypnosis of plenty throws me for a loop and I must leave the place, go out into the parking lot if I am going to not lose it in there.

I make a point of spending as little time as possible in a big store unless it is a book store. And this is for a special reason: book stores are the one place where I can squat or sit on the floor, where I don’t have to take in the whole inventory. Good book stores provide plenty of comfortable chairs. One can go to these and examine a potential purchase. One can give one’s all to a book and forget the shelves filled with other books all around him.

Still, bookstores present their challenges. Often the books I like best are located in the back of the store — in the history, religion, and reference sections. To get to the cash register, I must pass the displays of those volumes that have been deemed saleable by the Central Office. It is hard not to stop and look. Henry Ward Beecher said “No where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore.” These are words spoken by a man tried and acquitted once of adultery. And I know that a new book tempts me more than any woman. So I must leave a bookstore in haste when the desire to binge on words overcomes me, sometimes dropping the pile of what I have chosen on a chair.

They are all the same, these mega-stores. All merchandise. Walk the aisles for a time and you will realize the worst aspect: no people. No people interested in staying for very long because their televisions or jobs are calling them.