Shopping Surfeit - Sufficient Unto The Day
Shopping, the past-time extraordinaire. Everyone indulges - is there such a thing as excess? One supposes that nadir has been has been reached when women in particular declare that this is the past-time they were born to exhaust. And in our present time and space it can be an inexhausible search for fulfilment.In Saudi Arabia, for example, and other signal Middle East countries where women are not to be seen in public unescorted by a male relative, and must be driven to appointments, and must be covered lest the sight of their womanly attributes awaken impure thoughts in the minds of men, the place to congregate is shopping malls seemingly in the middle of a desertified landscape, where all the luxurious goods that can be available anywhere in wealthy Western countries are displayed for sale and satietion.
Little different than what we are exposed to here, where I happen to live. Where, a scant decade earlier there was a dearth of retail outlets of any description, in two short frantic years of blasting, digging and building, entire emporiums of goods appear to have arrived as though out of some fabled treasure-hunt. Now, acres of land have been given over to an orchestration of mini-malls, each hosting four or five retail establishments under a single roof, separated from the next such grouping by an elegant driveway.
These driveways criss-cross one another, each giving onto yet another grouping of retail outlets selling items as diverse as house linens, footwear, sports equipment, children's clothing, women's apparel, wine-making equipment, paint and wallpaper supplies, housewares, fast-food. And there are neighbourhood restaurants and pubs, banks, furniture stores, pharmacies, pet-food supplies, bakeries, and any number of other vital sellers-of-goods the absence of which would surely spell disaster in our lives.
Where once entire communities of shoppers parked at huge indoor shopping centres, walking into a huge indoor mall decorated with great potted palms and majestically spurting fountains, and all manner of clever little shops were collected all the better for the shopper's discriminating delectation - we now have an outdoor shopping experience. Before, the theory was that indoor shopping was a must in a cold climate country like Canada's. We've moved away from the stifling togetherness of the mall experience now, and have embraced the ersatz small-village experience of grouped shops approached from the outdoors.
All of which could conceivably spell a more salubrious way of shopping-lifestyle for potential shoppers living within a reasonably wide radius of these new shopping meccas, given their handy geographic placement, and the much-appreciated construction of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks the better to approach them by. Yet park in one of the myriad parking lots to service these grouped shops and there is an endless choreograph of vehicles spurting to and fro.
It's an exceedingly pleasant shopping landscape to be sure. The network of drives meshing with the grouped shops are not without their verdant boulevards, all well landscaped and soothing to one's aesthetic. Even if a shopper left a vehicle parked at its original spot and legged it over to a number of different shops, there might conceivably be an element of energy expended, but such, alas, is not the case, as vehicles are moved from one parking lot to access one particular shop, to yet another.
Leaving one to muse that at least when the destination was the all-encompassing mall, the vehicle was parked once, and the shopper moved about within to access the shops of interest that day. The end result being that although one had to drive to the initial installation and then home again, there was less traffic and energy usage than with this wonderful new shopping experience.
So in an ergonomic, ecology-enhancing perspective this might be conceived as a backward step.
But ain't it fun?!
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 14, 2006
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