Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home

Why should I shop till I drop?

A better question: Why would I shop till I drop?

An even better question: Why would a store want me to drop?

Perhaps I am dropping to the basement, where there is a special sale? A nutrition stand where I will be given an infusion to give me a second shopping wind?

Because otherwise, how does my dropping benefit the store? Why does not the store realize that if I drop, I will not be able to come back tomorrow?

And I wonder- who was the first to tell potential costumers to drop?

The honest truth is that sometimes after going shopping, I do feel like I want to drop. But I’ve never been like “Wow! I haven’t dropped today- but I’m almost there! Maybe I’ll go shopping tomorrow and see if I can actually drop this time!” Usually, it’s more like “I don’t care if I have to sew together bedsheets in order to make a shirt. I am never going shopping again.”

I do enjoy shopping sometimes- for example, put me in a backpacking gear store and I’m in heaven. Book stores are great, too. And music stores? Ask my wife how hard it is to convince me not to buy the whole store. But these are the few shopping opportunities in which I do not wish to drop.

Ikea in Oslo actually took shop till you drop to a new level, and in order to facilitate easy dropping, provides beds for customers who are tired in the middle of their shopping day.

City-life sometimes encourages us to “shop lest we drop,” i.e., shop to stay happy, or to “shop when we drop,” i.e., shop to cheer us when we’re sad (with shopping representing the unlikely (absurd?) savior of a lagging self-confidence.

One might implicate consumerism in global climate change and the dwindling potential for human survival- and therefore argue that we have shopped and as a result, have dropped, or are dropping. I recently saw a sustainability-minded site asking the very question, “Why shop till you drop?”

But I’m venturing a guess when I say that the mall is not implicating us in global climate change when they tell us to shop till we drop.

And yet, shopping-dropping is still often employed to describe the consumer experience (”shop till you drop” lands 799,000 hits on Google). Fascinatingly enough, there is a shopuntilyoudrop.net, which pays people to shop and review purchases. I wonder if there is an insurance policy if I sign up and actually drop.

So I leave this post without having figured out the mystery of shop till you drop.

But as a pretty word-obsessed human, I am going to deposit these shop-drop thoughts into my bank of nutty phrases, ponder the fact that we describe shopping with such a sense of urgency and continue to try and be more accurate with my words.

I will take advantage of this momentary inspiration to commit once again: Besides not telling people to drop, I will be careful with the following: I will not say that I am starving when I had a meal three or six hours ago, I will not say “I’m dead” when I accidentally misplace a document from work, and I will not call myself retarded when I find a typo in one of these blog posts.

Words will be a theme I return to often in Unpacked- without trying, words come up, in and out of my mind uncontrollably. I have been like that for a long time, but even more so since our trek. So I’ll continue to share. Conscious words represent a conscious mind, and whether advertising, writing a letter or an email or speaking with friends, speech is a direct reflection of our measures of individual, national and global integrity.

So if you’ll excuse me, I think I will run to an advertising agency to present my new phrase, Shop till you’re done.

It might not have the punch of shop till you drop, but it makes no suggestion that we expire, and rhyming is overrated, anyway.

I know there are tons of ridiculous ways in which we describe things. Can you think of any more? The same way political correctness refines speech-patterns into thought-patterns into action-patterns, refining inaccurate or insensitive phrasing makes us better, too. Please share!

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