FeedsSecret to making holiday shopping ‘fun’
Something about the shopping “experience” has always eluded me.
I was never one to spend an afternoon ferreting out the best deal on dish towels, and then return home triumphant and smug, regaling my friends and family with thrilling tales of my buying prowess.
The gathering gene seems to have missed me utterly, and I’m certain that if this were prehistoric times my cave family would subsist almost entirely on small herbivores and one type of berry, as I would be unwilling to seek out anything else.
“Poison berry again?” my cave husband would ask, and I would insist that it was all they had.
Christmas time is this process at ground zero level, and I sweat just thinking about those rows of endless storefronts creaking beneath the weight of their holiday decorations, while cashiers in Santa hats give customers the skunk eye, and when you finally reach the register, they tell you that they’re on a break.
Christmas shopping in Northville, I imagined, would just be more of that same kind of frantic, forced merriness, only colder and more expensive.
I was wrong.
There is something altogether different about small town shopping.
For one, the shopkeepers are usually friendly, and seem happy to see you.
I recall walking into a store in Northville, called the Stamppeddler. Outside the door there is a sign hanging which reads, “Your husband called…He said to buy anything you want!”
Inside the place is a colorful candy store of paper and stamps, stickers and albums. I overheard a 15-minute conversation between a woman buying invitations, and the cashier trying to steer her toward a multi-colored sheath of paper. Both seemed to be utterly engrossed in the outcome of this $5 transaction, something I could never recall seeing in any chain store. Not even a dollar store.
I realized that not only are small shop owners more likely to care about customer satisfaction, as they are personally entwined with the success or failure of their store, but owners of small shops, unlike chain stores, are free to indulge their own singular, eclectic passions.
The Stamppeddler is a store run by people who love stamping, for people who love stamping. Its old world capitalism at it’s effective best.
Plus small town shopping it’s just a lot more fun.
As I was walking down the wreath decked boulevard, while carols drifted in and out of earshot and crowds hustled by in long coats and wool caps, I discovered that those things which malls specialize in are the very things which take the joy out of Christmas shopping to begin with.
Everything is hurried; everything is the same. People go to the mall to find good deals, not specialty items. They go when they want to get shopping over with, done Saturday afternoon “in a single shot.”
The very convenience of multiple stores under one roof destroys the nature of Christmas shopping to begin with. Designed to be frivolous and heartfelt, leisurely and fun, malls corrupt the joy of giving into a no-win game one-ups-manship. You buy someone a gift because you have to, because it’s expected. And no one anywhere ever enjoyed doing anything they “had” to do.
Sure, it’s colder then mall shopping, but why shouldn’t it be? I remember shopping for Christmas trees with my father and brother when I was a girl, and the simple pleasure of stomping around in the freshly packed snow while we all looked around for the perfect, pie-shaped Douglas fir was worth more to me than every dollar I ever saved in the “convenience” of a shopping mall.
Some things are too valuable to be measured in dollars and cents.
