Shopping is a little shop of horrors

By Michael Upton

JAKARTA (JP): I'm just not geared up for shopping. It's something other people do: I don't.

I know I'm missing out. When I fumble in the morning for a pair of navy blue socks and find only brown, black and that garish pair given to me by a dear old friend of my mother's two Christmases ago, I either wear a different pair of pants or go out into the world with non-matching attire. Who cares? Who notices? It never occurs to me to go out and buy a pair of the color I want. I just muddle along with my old flattened, scratchy ones that are covered in little balls of fluff.

This means that I don't enjoy as often as I should the sensation of sliding one's foot into the stretchy new fabric of a recently purchased sock and feeling it clinging freshly and loyally to its new occupant. This is undoubtedly one of the minor pleasures of life, although a mild one compared to that of donning a pair of springy new underpants just released from the package (but these latter luxuries are not for disclosure in the genteel pages of The Jakarta Post).

And anyway, even the most ardent enthusiast of such hedonistic delights would admit that they are short-lived. If you are having a tough day at the office, with your secretary off sick, deadlines coming up and you're stuck in a two-hour meeting with an unpleasant antagonist, it's little consolation to say to yourself "Well, thank heaven I'm wearing my new underpants!" On the other hand, I'd be the first to admit that it's a miserable experience going into a meeting badly briefed (sorry, I couldn't resist that).

Let me get back to the point, before this turns into an article about what some people now prissily call Intimate Wear. Shopping. I avoid it. I just walk straight past shop windows, but it's not meanness that makes me do it. It's true that I'm inclined to avoid wasting money in that if there's a choice between a bottle of champagne at US$49 and one at $39, I'd tend to go for the latter. That derives partly from my parents' never having had any spare cash and partly from habits developed as a student on a long university course.

It's taken years of training by my wife to get to the point where I buy two of something to avoid having to go out again next week to buy another one. I consider even that to be a slippery slope, because if you take it to its ultimate conclusion, you'd buy 50 or 500 of them and then you're into the untrammeled greed of bulk buying (I have a friend in marketing who describes it that way). Oh, the self-inflicted misery bulk-buyers undergo of finding places to stack their bloated purchases. And then the desperation of forcing the family to bolt down the last few packs of yogurt or drink more coffee because they bought an obscene quantity of it eight months ago and the sell-by date is next week. And the coffee doesn't taste of coffee any more.

No, it's not meanness -- it's simply lack of interest. I can't seem to drum up any enthusiasm for the stuff on sale. Shopping centers now seem to be occupied mainly by shops selling diamond- studded fountain pens, watches that remain watertight under 200 metres of water (of course we all need one or two of those) and knee-length ladies' boots, so practical for Jakarta's climate and no doubt the lady can wear them hang-gliding too. So I simply set my sights on my ultimate aim and walk right by everything else. I don't divert from my purpose; there's no "Any Other Business" section on my agenda.

If I need to buy blue cheese, a bar of soap and a bottle of ink, I come home with blue cheese, a bar of soap and a bottle of ink. Nothing more, nothing less. Sometimes I have to go into a well-known Jakarta department store to buy an Economist magazine or a roll of sticky tape -- both are purchases that keep me absorbed for hours -- but I never look at other potential buys, in fact I don't even see anything else for sale.

This tends to irritate my wife. "Oh, you've been to SHOPPO, darling (most of them end in O, don't they). What did you think of the king-size divan matching fitted sheet, pillow and bolster sets? They're on 30 percent discount and we do need some new bed linen."

Blank look.

"But they're right next to the magazine stand - you must have seen them."

Vaguely -- "Oh yes, lovely dear. Shall I buy a set next time I'm there?"

"Not one, we need three sets ... oh never mind, I'd better get them myself."

Part of this gormlessness derives, of course, from the fact that men are practically blind when it comes to domestic issues. Many a wife expresses incredulity that her husband can peer into the fridge and not see the butter dish that she is then obliged to go and get herself.

"Oh, that's where it was," we husbands say lamely. "I didn't look on that shelf." But in my case at least it's also connected with an innate, perhaps perverse resistance to salesmanship. The feeling that I want to decide what I buy and when to buy it, irrespective of what any vendor wants me to do. You're selling king-size divan matching fitted sheet, pillow and bolster sets? Hmm, OK, but don't call me, I'll call you some time.

Actually, I like things which don't match -- just look at my socks.