Lately I spend more time in long lines surfing my phone, and less time huffing and puffing.
As far as WWYDW I’ve literally made all those choices before while being in a store. Back in the day when I was super busy, running around with the girls, I used to add a quick pop into a store for things right before picking them up from school, or dance, or some activity or other. I used to have an amazing gift for picking the best/fastest line, which I have to confess I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. Now that I no longer have that talent I’ve gone from breezing through stores in a flash, to ending up in the worst/longest line far too often. With that new wave of bad luck came the huffing, puffing, and eye rolling worst version of my shopping self. Once I realized that this was becoming a problem, and not a cute one, I decided to do a couple of things.
1) remind myself that it’s nobody’s problem that I’m trying to squeeze in a last minute errand with not nearly enough time to do so.
2) tell myself that I never know what the universe is protecting me from. Meaning who knows what might have happened to me if I had been driving on the road at the time that I should have been driving.
I now spend my time in lines meditating on these two things, and it makes the waiting so much more bearable. Except for today. Today I had a strange situation come up where I went into a store with Mikaela, I was there for a number of items for the cottage, and a couple of things for myself. We walked in, we were ignored. We browsed the main floor, got through the entire level without anybody so much as looking at us, never mind offering to help us. Unfazed, since this wasn’t the floor where the items we were after were anyway, so we took ourselves upstairs. We get to the top of the stairs, the greeter, doesn’t greet us. Four salespeople don’t so much as look at us…hmmm I say to Mikaela, “how rude.” She agrees.
We finish our spin around the floor, we have four items we’re interested in purchasing. Three are for “sure” and the one is questionable…we stand there waiting, waiting, waiting. I finally go over to the greeter and ask him if he can please call a salesperson, he says he will. We wait, wait, wait. Nobody. He doesn’t even come over to tell me what’s going on. I go back over to him, not as patient as I first was and say; “hey look at these things I’m definitely buying can you please just ask a salesperson to please come and show me this handbag.”
“I’ve already asked them, they’re all busy at the moment, and those who are not are on lunch.”
It was 11:55am, the store opened at 10am…lunch breaks already? Ummm, okay. Anyway, just as we were set to leave somebody came out of a wall and helped us. We made the purchases and off we went.
Why do I tell you this? I tell you this because in the current shopping climate there, in my opinion seems to be a few things happening here.
1) stores are understaffed, which makes long wait times the cost of shopping in person these days I guess.
2) so many people in this particular store left empty handed. They were just looking at this handbag, and that wallet, and these shoes, and that belt. They had the salespeople hopping, but didn’t spend a cent. So maybe salespeople are jaded, and no longer in the mood to be helpful?
3) perhaps it’s the reality that many items will be returned anyway that makes salespeople less interested in helping you find that perfect piece?
Being the sort of shopper who only goes into a store if I need something, in the past I’ve had very little patience for the browsers and the returners. But, as I settle more and more into letting people live the life they want to live, even if that means binge shopping and purge returning, I spend more of my time in lines surfing my phone and waiting my turn, and very little of it, if any huffing and puffing.
