Friends don’t let friends drink and shop online
The next time you get deliriously sloshed and think it’s no big deal to go online shopping, remember this ominous headline: “Drunk Chinese man’s Singles’ Day shopping frenzy ends with a live pig, peacock and giant salamander.”
The bizarre story, courtesy of the South China Morning Post, is my new favourite cautionary tale in this golden age of people getting blotto and filling their virtual carts with stuff they don’t need, don’t want and won’t remember buying.
It has replaced my old favourite headshaker, which came from a MarketWatch story last month: “A couple of British newlyweds got so drunk on the first night of their honeymoon that they bought the Sri Lanka hotel they were staying in.”
That seems like an unwise financial decision. But when it comes to drunk shopping, best intentions and the bottom line are no match for impaired judgment. The Chinese guy just wanted to upgrade his wardrobe. He intended to only buy two new outfits. This poor bastard just wanted to look nice. Then he got hammered. Now he’s sharing his bathtub with a giant salamander, curling up for bed with a Thai pig and getting chased around by a frightened peacock.
His apartment is one panda away from becoming a tourist attraction.
I know what you’re thinking: this could never happen in North America. Yes, well, that’s only because it’s harder to impulse-buy live animals. But if Amazon offered discounted ferrets — if you could pony up for an actual pony at Walmart or stock up on marsupials at Best Buy — the courier companies would now be frantically replacing frazzled drivers with qualified zookeepers.
The cautionary tale here isn’t the cultural commodity; it’s the drunk shopping.
Just how bad is the situation? Market research this summer from Finder claimed 4.3 million Canadians have online shopped while under the influence in the past year. This amounts to $724 million in inebriated sales. Apparently, if you spied on one in five Canadians who were shopping online, you’d detect empty bottles at their feet.
And this was before legal marijuana, which is sure to create a new category of impaired consumerism in 2019. My guess is Grocery Gateway is now dealing with a record-breaking spike in weekly demand for Doritos and Cap’n Crunch.
A big part of the problem is we don’t label drunk shopping a problem.
Friends don’t let friends drink and drive. Friends don’t let friends drink and text. But there are no laws, real or
social, stopping a friend from pounding back shots of tequila and thinking, “You know what I need? A robot guard dog!”
This brings us to another misconception, which is that drunk shopping is a victimless non-crime. Wrong. If a friend calls a couple of days after a bender to ask if you have any memory of the 30-foot trampoline he ordered, you will fall down laughing. You could get hurt. Drunk shopping is a hilarious health hazard.
Take a glance at other drunk shopping surveys released in recent months. Not only are there odd factoids — gin aficionados spend the most, whisky lovers the least — there is also growing evidence this epidemic of half-soused consumerism is adding to the burden of household debt and making corporations think there is a market for singing hairbrushes and toaster ovens that only cook hot dogs.
Did you open a Christmas gift last year that was so jarringly weird or hideous all you could do was smile politely and wonder what the giver was thinking? The giver was not thinking. He or she was probably just blind drunk at the point of purchase.
Drunk shopping affects everyone at this time of year because it’s the sober among us who inherit the unwanted crap.
And what’s frightening is the perfect storm that is gathering in this great land. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner. We can buy booze in grocery stores. It’s now easier to secure weed than lawn fertilizer. And to top it off, Goop has just released its 2019 Holiday Gift Guides. Jammed with wildly expensive and utterly ridiculous items — an $820 incense burner, a $150,000 private photo session in London, a $1,450 folding metal table — Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site is like catnip to impaired shoppers.
You know who is most likely to hit “order” on a Surf Swing or a Banana Lamp or Marble Dumbells or a box of matches that, quite shockingly, will set you back 200 bucks? Someone who has had way too much to drink. There is no doubt in my mind that at least 70 per cent of Goop buyers are, in fact, blitzed out of their skulls.
So what can be done? Outside of mandating a breathalyzer test before any online purchase, probably not much. But as we head into the holidays, I encourage you to either drink or shop — but never do both at the same time.
Never forget the peacock, pig and giant salamander.