retail/therapy
We needed a toothbrush, bandaids, milk, cans of seltzer, hand soap, and goldfish crackers, so I went to Target. There were no carts available and a pissed-off crowd was gathered near the registers, making sure to stand six feet apart, waiting for carts to emerge. After a few minutes of looking at my phone and milling around I decided to just shop directly into my granny cart. No one seemed to care. I walked through the aisles and grabbed things as quickly as I could, then allowed myself to be shepherded obediently into the shortest of the three checkout lines snaking around the store. I didn’t buy anything I hadn’t planned to. I didn’t linger by comparing brands or prices or reading ingredients, because why would I spend any more time than absolutely necessary indoors with strangers? Everyone else shopping there was doing the exact same thing.
I used to find this kind of errand fun. More than fun - soothing, even sort of blissful. At Target, at an off-hours Trader Joe’s, a Whole Foods pre-Amazon, the suburban Stop n Shop near my father in law’s house, I could happily spend an hour pushing a cart around, maybe sipping a mall-coffee beverage of the sort I wouldn’t usually buy, like a chai or a matcha latte. I’d get toilet paper and a pair of fast-fashion shorts cheap enough to buy without trying on, or a new lip balm, or a coloring book for Raffi. The organized well-stocked shelves of different foods and goods felt like infinite possibility and abundance, not waste. I felt lulled and comforted in these stores. I knew on some level that it was not sustainable or healthy for people or workers or the planet to have giant stores with twelve different brands of hand soap and an entire aisle just for chips and tropical fruit year-round. Of course not. Feeling good in Target always felt like a guilty pleasure, but the pleasure outweighed the guilt a million to one. The minor gifts to myself I would buy there never totaled more than ten or twenty bucks, but of course that adds up. Everything adds up.
I’m not trying to feel nostalgic for pre-COVID Target. We have to dream of a better world where there is pleasure available that’s realer than the ephemeral dopamine boost of buying a new flavor of ChapStick. I’m the last person in the world who’s going to try to tell you what that will look like, or what we need to do to get there. All I know is that we have to dream!
“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” — José Esteban Munõz, Cruising Utopia