Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  We don’t want absolute crap, but we also don’t want to pay a lot. (A year ago, I would have said, “We alsocan’t pay.” Now I know that to a large extent I’m choosing.) So we’ve come to Fulton Street, where one thing counts and one thing only. The words on the wall of the strip’s busiest store say it all: “Conway’s is Cheaper.”

  We start out swift and methodical as Marines. In short order, we’ve picked up slippers at Payless and socks, sweat pants, sweatshirts, and a jacket at Modell’s. Then, with only shirts, undershirts, and pajamas, we stall.

  We enter the doorway of any merchant whose display, or even whose name, does not imply Fashion: Price Mart, ABC Stores, Conway’s. We skip places like Extasy, which, we reason, is unlikely to cater to eighty-five-year-old Jewish nursing home residents. We are at first overwhelmed by volume. We wade past acres of pastel-colored polyester children’s clothes, risk live burial under the racks of down parkas. The merchants are getting every penny out of every square inch of Brooklyn’s valuable real estate. It’s hard to breathe.

  With all this merch, though, we keep hitting what Paul calls the Home Depot Effect: we browse rows and rows of a given consumer category, but find not a single thing we want to purchase. On Fulton Street as in Home Depot, the store buyers have selected products to please everyone, so they please no one who does not want what “everyone” wants. Not only are the selections limited, they are all limited in the same ways. One store might trend a little gangsta and another a little preppie, but at all of them this year’s jackets are puffy and black; a few are puffy and red. If you want yellow, you’re out of luck. Blue jeans are acid-washed to suggest prolonged frottage around the buttocks and thighs. Never mind the president’s abstinence campaign, chaste blue jeans are not on offer.

  And if each store’s stock is the same, so are its deficits. We’re seeking a humble grail: three packages of white, size-large cotton undershirts with V-necks (to ease dressing). Each underwear section carries a full size range of Hanes crewneck T’s, but no V-necks. We find Fruit of the Loom V-necks in small, medium, and extra-large, but no larges. Giving up on the cheaper stores, we stop at Macy’s, where we locate a stack of large V-neck T-shirts. But, made by Calvin Klein, they sell for about twice the price, which I can’t bear to spend. I’m sure the deltoid-bearing cap sleeve and hint of spandex across the pecs make a difference in fit and sex appeal. But with his advanced dementia and all, I’m figuring Dad won’t appreciate these touches.

  So much for the brilliant efficiency of the U.S. marketplace.

  Yet how can I complain? At Modell’s our bill for twelve pairs of socks, four Russell brand sweat pants, and a down jacket comes to $112.92. At Payless, the slippers are $7.99. Six pairs of pajamas at Price Mart come in under $60. Aren’t we getting more for less?

  Yes and no. Or rather, I’ll rephrase the question: more of what?

  “Boy,” I say to Paul as the cashier rings up Dad’s new down jacket, $29.99, reduced from $39.99. “How much could the person who sews this possibly be making?” Like almost every other item on the racks, this one is produced in China. On the street, I tell him the joke about the recent Harvard Law School graduate who is paid a visit by a suave Devil in a well-cut Italian suit. Mephisto offers Harvard a brilliant career at a prestigious Wall Street firm, a million dollars a year, a beautiful wife, a house in the Hamptons, and a new BMW annually. He asks for only one thing in return: the lawyer’s immortal soul. Scanning the contract, Harvard takes up his Montblanc pen to sign on the dotted line. “Wow,” he says to his future business partner, “this all looks great. I have just one question:What’s the catch? ”

  In the past I have relished shopping for bargains, unearthing my own little token of this moment’s street fashion from the ho-hum heap. But now the rewards of shopping have stepped to the wings, and “the catch” is front and center. Not to put too fine a point on it, the immiseration of the workers of the world and the destruction of the environment make it harder to enjoy my beautiful house and my beautiful wife. Of course, shopping at a posher venue would not change the picture. I tend to doubt that the extra dollars for those Calvin Klein designer undershirts are ending up in the pockets of the seamstresses and salesclerks.

  Speaking of immiseration, there’s another way you get what you pay for on Fulton Street. By ten in the morning, seven out of ten people wearing store uniforms have reached an intermediate stage of either narcolepsy or rage, which they are expressing in the form of malign neglect of the customers.

  Paul and I stop for toothpaste at Duane Reade. On the shelf, a Special card advertises Tom’s Natural at $3.15. The girl at the counter pushes her copy ofUs an inch to the left and rings up the toothpaste at $4.75.

  “Over there it says $3.15,” I protest.

  “It’s $4.27 plus tax,” she answers, her eyes moving back to the magazine.

  “But it says $3.15.”

  Now she gazes sideways and speaks into the air. “Do you have a Duane Reade Customer Card?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, it’s $4.75.”

  “Can I have a customer card?”

  “I don’t have any cards.”

  On the street, I read the sales slip. It taunts: “YOUCOULDHAVESAVED$1.18 TODAY.”

  At Conway’s, with only a high counter between her and the restive hordes, one checkout clerk has scrawled her defense across her red smock in black marker, like a crucifix on a warrior’s breast-plate: “I DON’TDOCUSTOMERSERVICE.”

  We customers respond in kind. We growl at the workers and at each other. When a teenager steps in front of me carrying a bushel of sweaters, I ask her, not terribly politely, to go to the end of the line. “Bitch!” she spits. “You probably voted for Bush.” I guess we blue-staters are all feeling a bit touchy.

  By the time we get home, I feel frustrated, exhausted, and, though I’ve managed to amass three enormous shopping bags full of most of what Dad needs, ineffectual. Nothing we bought is beautiful. Everyone on Fulton Street was nasty to us and I was nasty to them. If, as Georg Simmel observed, we assign value to those things that resist our possessing them, then why did I feel, increasingly throughout the day, that I would not spend more than $5 on a three-pack of large-size V-neck undershirts unless, well, unless they paid me five bucks to buy it?

  Shopping as pleasure and agency? Gimme a break.

  NOVEMBER 26

  The tough go shopping, they say. We weaklings can’t take it. But if last week’s trip enervated me, the exercise limbered up my store-crawling muscles. I’ll need them today, the Friday after Thanksgiving, biggest shopping day of the year, called “Black Friday” for its anticipated role in pushing the bottom line into the profit column. Today is also Buy Nothing Day, sponsored by Adbusters, who are trying to make it the smallest shopping day of the year.

  I’m up at six and emerging from the subway at the Atlantic Mall and Terminal Market by seven to catch the first wave of shoppers. Good thing I don’t live in Kansas, where the malls unlatched their doors at four-thirty. In civilized New York, Target opened at six.

  Climbing the subway stairs, I spot Jackie, a well-dressed white woman with sleek auburn hair, a friendly take-charge mien, and a well-thought-out shopping list. She buys gifts for about fifteen people, she says. “I’m really good at getting the right present. I put a lot of time and thought into it.” This season she plans to spend about $1,000, not counting wrapping, decorations, and holiday entertaining. She will charge it all on her American Express card, which must be paid in full when the bill comes. “I love Christmas,” Jackie tells me. “I’m a giver.” She also mentions that she buys wrapping paper right after the holidays at half-price and has an eye out for the “right present at the right price” all year round. I’m impressed. Is Jackie typical of the cohort that sets its alarm clock for 6A.M. after a daylong marathon of eating and drinking, just to save a few bucks on a George Foreman grill?

  Inside the mall, I take the escalators up three floors, on the way passing a half-dozen stores. T
heir staffs are pottering around the piles of sweaters and scarves; the rooms are empty of customers. Only McDonald’s is doing any business, as shoppers stoke up on fats and carbohydrates for the rigors of the day. When I reach Target at the top of the last escalator, I finally encounter human beings picking up products and putting them into carts, which are plastic and red and the size of shipping containers.

  The mall is a microcosm of the U.S. retailing industry: all commerce is being sucked upward. A couple of years ago Ames succumbed to Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Sears. Last spring, Wal-Mart crushed Toys ‘R’ Us. Last week, Kmart paid $11 billion to acquire Sears, which two and a half years ago ate Land’s End. Now Sears/Kmart is the third-biggest retail box after Wal-Mart and Home Depot, kicking Target down a notch. In New York, though, with Wal-Mart still trying to muscle its way past resistant communities and small business owners and Kmart a pale presence on a dull corner of the garish Lower East Side, Target opened with a celebrity bash and immediately became the “It” store. In this mall, the red giant sits atop its competitors like a lion on a heap of smaller, recently slain prey. We customers step over the carcasses as we ascend to pay homage to the victor.

  The 6A.M. shoppers are indeed motivated and organized. Lakeesha, a twenty-one-year-old mother out for the day with her cousin Sharone, is already on line at the cashier. She has completed all her shopping for her son, Antwon, and her two nieces. Lakeesha considers herself a prudent shopper. “I’m not goin’ in the hole,” she swears. Sharone has made the same pledge.

  These good intentions may be no more grounded in reality than those of the retailers who call this Black Friday. Lakeesha has budgeted $700 for the holidays. Her purchases on this first day—before 8A.M. , a full month before Christmas—total more than $250 and she’s told me she’s got “a big family, a bih-ih-ihg family.” She’s not buying gifts for others only, either. Along with the Disney brand Winnie the Pooh and two My Baby Princess Cinderellas, there’s a three-CD music system and a Black & Decker grill in her cart, both for herself. Sharone has purchased a DVD player, also for herself. “I already got one,” she says, “but it was $19.99, so I couldn’t affordnot to buy it.” The act of spending in order to save, whether you need the thing or not, is called “spaving.”

  As I watch the cashiers tapping on the keys and swiping the plastic, I think of the reports last week byFrontline and theNew York Times on the predatory practices of the credit card companies, which draw in high-risk borrowers with offers of no- or low-rate cards, then swoop in and raise the rates (to as high as 30 percent) after one late payment or the discovery of delinquent payments on other credit, such as a car loan or mortgage. Similar schemes plague low-income homebuyers. These practices are one reason that last year 1.5 million Americans declared personal bankruptcy, twice as many as a decade ago.

  If Lakeesha or Sharone find themselves in the hole after all, consumption critics Cecile Andrews and Robert Frank will be proven correct, in one way. In another, though, they are dead wrong. Introduce these two women to Cecile Andrews and she would not recognize them as shoppers. “Shopping makes you unhappy,” says Andrews. It might have made me unhappy last Saturday. It might make Cecile Andrews unhappy. But Lakeesha and Sharone are having a grand time.

  The same is true for almost every other person I speak to in the store today. Not only are they having fun, they feel they are doing good. Friends and family recruited as scouts and stevedores say that they too are here to serve. “She’s my best friend, so I help her,” says one young woman along “to carry.” She’s launching her own expedition Sunday. A tall young man in dreadlocks says he buys presents throughout the year for a list that is “constantly growing, with all the new arrivals.” Does he do it out of obligation? On the contrary, “it’s a sense of self-satisfaction,” he says.

  I find the Cruz family, a mother and two adult daughters, Martha and Elizabeth, considering a camouflage T-shirt with the legendYOU CAN ’T SEE MEacross the chest. “For Jessica!” Martha is exclaiming. “Is thisadorable?! ”

  Approaching the women when they have moved to the boys’ pajama table, I ask if they know it’s Buy Nothing Day. Elizabeth thinks she’s heard of it, and adds, “I respect that opinion. I mean, I appreciate the message, that the holiday is not about materialism.” For the Cruzes, she says, it isn’t anyway.

  “Sometimes we have, sometimes we don’t,” explains Martha. “When we don’t, I bake cookies and wrap them up beautiful…It’s not about price or value.”

  “Remember the year I gave everyone a lint remover?” asks Elizabeth, and they all laugh. “For us, it’s just, ‘I wanna say an extra I love you.’ We thank God that we are together even if we didn’t have food on the table.” I walk away feeling fuzzy and a little sheepish, wishing I had one of those T-shirts under which to camouflage my nonbuying self.

  Not everyone is as skilled as Jackie, as jovial as Lakeesha, or as warmhearted as the Cruzes. In housewares, I trail two thick, bewigged Russian-speaking Orthodox Jews. Unlike my Czech tenant, she of the air fresheners and toilet bowl cleaning system, these women have obviously not yet mastered the art of the deal. They stand for a long time before an armory of electric openers—the squat, cylindrical Black & Decker Jar Opener ($29.99), the B&D Cordless Can Opener ($19.89) and Extra-Tall can opener ($12.99), the Hamilton Beach Classic Chrome Smooth-Edge Can Opener ($19.99). They pick an item off the shelf, exchange a few gloomy sentences and pessimistic head shakes, then put the item back on the shelf. Then they pick up another item. Finding all the openers unsatisfactory, they move on to the coffee grinders. After a while, one of the women disappears and returns with a Diet Coke. They stand mid-aisle, gulping greedily.

  Leaving the Russians to fortify themselves for their next salvo at the free market, I drift through the aisles examining the merchandise, pricing a hundred-pound bag of dog food and an econopak of Scotch Magic tape, handling a pink silk teddy and an Italian ceramic mixing bowl. Things look good here; unlike Wal-Mart, Target offers a mix of bottom feed, hip kitsch, and higher-quality goods.

  I search the tags for the provenance of the products. Tiny Hot Wheels cars (49 cents each, reduced from 87) are from China; DVD players, toys, and swimsuits are from China. A pair of Cherokee plush infant overalls, at less than $8, though, are made in the U.S.A. I calculate the cost of the babywear in my head. The fabric is a good, soft cotton; that can’t be cheap. The design is sophisticated; they’ve got to pay for that. I conclude that the price comes out of the paychecks of the women at the sewing machines, who must work in Chinatown in New York or Los Angeles, not China.

  On Fulton Street I perceived a general level of misery. At Target today, I note that spirits are high. Is it just me? Was I projecting my sadness about my father and my frustration over the stores’ selection and quality onto everyone else? Am I doing the opposite today, just because it’s a beautiful day and I’m in a better mood? Should I pronounce shopping a good thing, or anyway, not so bad…as long as it’s practiced in moderation…without over-charging the credit card…in a spirit of giving…responding to true need…with social and environmental consciousness…and the stuff looks good?

  Having read the paeans to shopping and the screeds against it, the analyses of consumption as fundamental to culture and the polemics against consumerism as a machine creating insatiable desire, I can identify with my fellow shoppers or condescend to them from the heights of my superior taste, as I choose. I can paint them as harried or happy, as spavers or savers, dupes to advertising or sophisticated agents of postmodern identity formation. I can indict them as collaborators in the exploitation of their global sisters and brothers or forgive them as uneducated and underpaid victims of the same system.

  I can make judgments about their needs and their desires. Does Lakeesha really need that Black & Decker grill? Does the teenager on Fulton Street who accused me of voting for Bush need all the sweaters she was purchasing? Do Jack and Melanie need…whatever they had in all those bags? And while we’re at it, does my father r
eally need a half-dozen pairs of pajamas?

  Would the sweater girl decide not to buy the garments if she knew the connections between them and the worker and the manufacturer and the stockholder and the lobbyist and the World Bank and the president she loathes? I know those connections and I’m still buying a half-dozen pajamas, made in India, for a total of $59.99.

  As I ramble through the aisles, a young salesman asks if I need help. He seems genuinely concerned, as if offering spiritual counsel or a hot meal. But I don’t need help. In fact, I am feeling almost lightheaded with the absence of need or desire.

  And just as I realize I am free of the desire to shop, I also feel free of the desire to judge others who desire to shop. I can condemn overconsumption and the systems that support it and it supports, but I don’t have to condemn the shopper.

  Here in front of the rack of ergonomically correct kitchen gadgets, I fall into a reverie. It’s not the reverie of a shopping-free heaven with the Brian Eno soundtrack, not Richard Czaplinski’s cabin with the homemade snath hanging from the wall. Rather, it’s one in which the Chinese worker and the Chinatown worker both join a union, so they’re not stealing each other’s paychecks from the same thin envelope. The factories that make the sweaters are governed by international antipollution laws. The sweaters cost more, but the price differential between the China-made sweater and the Chinatown-made sweater isn’t so great that it shuts down the Chinatown shop or encourages the sweater company to ship the product from halfway around the globe, adding barrels of oil to the environmental costs of the sweater. In my little heaven, the banks don’t hawk credit cards with the cynical expectation that the borrower will fail to pay them off, and if the companies do prey on weak debtors, a strong government regulator whacks them good. Without the credit card, the girl at Conway’s is paying in cash, and higher wages make the sweater a little more expensive. So she is buying one sweater instead of seven, but not going into debt for it.