Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Shopping sucks the life out of any travel experience

Denis Horgan The Hartford Courant

A man joining his wife at the next table in the airport restaurant was rolling his eyes and fuming.

“We just had to pay $50 in excess baggage fees,” he said as he sat down. “When we started, we didn’t have excess baggage. Now we do. All from shopping!”

His wife simply smiled at him benignly, the way people smile at dumb beasts.

Shopping.

Shopping is the vampire of vacations, sucking the life (and money) out of the travel experience. It gets in the way of sightseeing, consumes valuable time and energy all for nothing and in every fashion fritters away an endeavor designed for higher things.

No one in his right mind sets out to shop on a vacation. Who on earth would do such a thing? What lunatic would start her list with items like “go to the mall/souk/bazaar”?

Yet so often shopping, like kudzu, takes over the itinerary. Visit the Louvre? Sorry, we have to wander instead like the lost tribes of Israel from shop to shop, shopping. Want to see the Brooklyn Bridge? Fat chance when there are stores galore yet to visit. Suggest buying the Brooklyn Bridge, and you’d have a better chance of visiting the thing.

To say the obvious, it is not a male thing to waste precious vacation time shopping. Left to his own devices, the male traveler will pursue more noble efforts — like scratching and spitting while fishing. The male will prefer the cultural or historical vistas over the unendingly alike shelves and counters of stores. Heaven help us.

For, like dumb beasts, the male has no vote. Look at any shopping emporium in Boston or Djibuoti, in Lhasa or Los Angeles, and you can see the males in excruciating agony waiting and waiting and waiting, burros without even the carrot, while the women shop like lunatics, a song on their lips.

Shopping is boring, boring, boring. Watching tortoises race is an absolutely frantic diversion compared with shopping. Continents drift faster than things are bought. Join a busload of shoppers heading for a mall? Better to run a rope around your neck and be dragged by that bus. Brother Rip fell into his 20-year Catskill snooze not because of the rum of the nine-pin bowlers but because Mrs. Van Winkle took him shopping.

The attics of frequent travelers are full not with souvenirs or mementos. No, they are full with suitcases. Start off with two suitcases, and you come home with three or four; it is the trick of the cargo-hauling trade to buy another suitcase on the road to hold all the purchases from shopping.

Budget calculations as detailed and refined as any at NASA or the World Bank turn out to be out-of-this-world, world-class bunk due to the plague of shopping. Plan for the airfare, add in the hotels and the meals and the tips and the entry fees, and you might think you have some small sense of what a trip will cost. Hah. By the time the shopping is done, the plane fare and hotel bill are the smaller elements of the total.

Working together planning a trip, arguments galore spin out over the price of this hotel room or that tour program: “That $5 makes a huge difference.” Pennies are watched. Corners are cut. Costs are carefully factored, balanced, shaded, shaved.

Shopping then comes along and throws the whole plan out the window. No male ever knows the true cost of a trip because the bills come in so long afterward, when he’s not looking.

As by gravel on the ice rink or bald patches on the ski slope, the smooth flow of a vacation’s flow is toppled head over heel by the infliction of shopping. You can see a whole museum in 75 minutes, but to select a single blouse takes a half-day. Put 300 identical towels in a pile, and each one must be examined, one by one, while the sand flows out of the travel hourglass.

What compels this addiction? Did they bring along too little? Don’t make me laugh. It is axiomatic that the person bringing the most in her luggage will be the person to buy even more on the road, and the poor fool who brought the least, he will buy the least.

Do they need this stuff? No. Women who already have a perfectly good dress at home will insist on looking for another even though one dress can’t be told from another anyway.

Is time lost to shopping for a particular bit of Laotian silverware or rare Andean weavings? No. Is the day gone because of the pursuit of exquisite Botswanan wood carvings or delicate Luxembourgian teacups? Of course not.

All the time and energy is squandered shopping for things that are available in warehouse lots two blocks from home. Clothing and more clothing. Gewgaws. The perfect gift, surely, but the shopping for which takes longer than you have known the recipient. In shopping, it is the hunt that counts, not the quarry.

Bargains? There are so few bargains in the world of shopping. Clothing costs more everywhere else, yet the shopper hails as a success snaring a skirt that costs what a small elephant goes for. Taxes and duties triple the cost, and you need a brace of lawyers to master the forms. Extra fees are levied by the airlines required to get off the ground with the weight of a locomotive in the baggage compartment. From shopping.

Does any of this deter the hophead shopper? Of course not. No, she is not about to let some foolish little thing like a vacation get in the way of a shopping spree.