ANDRE BEGIN

A few weeks ago, the stars aligned perfectly to make a trip to the city to visit a favourite shopping mall a worthwhile undertaking.

These days, faced with a 45 minute drive to get to the downtown core, visits are less frequent. Between the price of gas and my desire to spend more time writing, driving to the mall for the heck of it just isn’t really in the cards.

This time, the trip was well-justified. I had accumulated a decent-sized shopping list of items I could not find closer to home accompanied by a strong sense of determination.

What was different with this trip was that I also planned on taking my time, to linger and to browse, concepts that were erased from our collective consciousness during the pandemic in the name of health and safety.

That being the case, I gave myself permission to make a day out of it. Yet with that permission came a very weird thought process during my drive to the city.

In my mind, I was rearranging the order of the shopping list’s action items. The idea was to make the best use of my time and energy, making sure I wasn’t walking through the same parts of the mall several times over.

What struck me as the most bizarre part of this process was having to make the deliberate choice of starting with the task of trying on clothes at the very beginning of the shopping trip.

Years of shopping experience have taught me that trying on new clothes can be a time and energy-sucking activity.

If I don’t do it at the beginning when time, energy and patience are at their best, I won’t be in the right mindset to do it later in search of the most flattering fit, look and colours.

If I do it later in the shopping trip, when I am already hot, tired or traumatized by crowds of hot and tired shoppers, I may not have the same degree of clarity of thought and objectivity. I may settle for whatever I tried on or I may walk away empty handed.

If I walk away empty handed, that just means I’d have to start the whole thing all over again.

Who is this person?

What the heck happened?

Is this the same guy who used to be able to shop till he could drop?

It’s no accident that shopping occupied a fair part of my headspace over the years, but I came by it honestly and without shame.

In the 1980s, I worked for three years in a busy shopping mall in the city, which was steps away from my university and some of the city’s night life.

Not surprisingly, that mall became the epicentre for most of my activities whether for school, for my part-time job or for socializing. The mall also became my go-to place for quickly picking up almost anything that I needed given its strategic placement geographically and in my life. It’s true what they say about location, location, location!

In the 1990s when I started my career years, I was a regular visitor to malls as I tried to cultivate a professional look for the office. Being a guy of small stature, with feet in a hard-to-find size, I spent a fair amount of time scavenging for the investment pieces that didn’t need major alterations to look like they weren’t my big brother’s hand-me-downs.

This treasure hunt also carried over to my travels to larger cities, in search of stores we didn’t have at home, to expand my options for unique items that reflected my borderline extrovert personality.

That being the case, when it comes to shopping, I’ve had a lot of training over the years, going through store after store with the endurance of a long distance runner.

But clearly, I was out of practice.

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t churning through business casual outfits on a daily basis, through the four seasons, that I didn’t have a steady need for replacements due to wear and tear.

Maybe it’s because of retirement, where the philosophy of “dressing for the next job I want” is no longer a professional consideration.

Maybe it’s because of the process of downsizing in which I realized that I didn’t need quite so much, especially for my future in the “gig economy” as a writer.

Plus practicality prevails now. When a truly favourite piece is ready for donation, it often gets replaced with an identical or similar item.

Whether it is for any of these reasons, or simply because energy isn’t in the same abundance as it was in my twenties and thirties, I surprise myself in having to strategically prioritize tasks.

Once the most energy consuming shopping is done and out of the way, I can shift my focus to the easier sure-thing items, like the ones that don’t need trying on and that are always available at certain stores.

That way, when the energy starts fizzling out, if I still have more shopping to do, it’s either time to take a break for a delightful snack and a beverage, or even lunch. It’s all about pacing oneself, a theme to which I am just getting accustomed.

But wait!… Just to keep things interesting, there’s another wild card in the equation: shopping bags.

In nailing down my itinerary for a mall shopping trip, the algorithm also needs to take into consideration how much I can carry, before getting hot, tired and cranky, without finding myself at the opposite end of the mall and having to run all the way back to the car trunk to drop them off, and then return to the same spot resume my shopping.

Who knew that shopping could become so complicated?

Either way, the shopping trip ended up being my first real opportunity to go shopping in the middle of the week and to enjoy it at a leisurely pace. With no real time restriction, I was able to take my time, to try things on, to browse, and to take as many breaks as I wanted.

While I can’t say I shopped till I dropped in the literal sense, I do admit to sleeping very well that night, knowing that I had crossed several items off my to-do list while making the most of a great trip to the city.

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André