◼ A shopaholic goes back to the stores — and didn’t like it,
Shopping has changed in some ways, but it was so normal it made a diehard uncomfortable
My name is Laura and I’m a shopaholic.
Shopping was right up there with sports as my favourite hobby in a prepandemic world. It wasn’t so much the buying — though finding the right piece is always a win — as it was the routine. Getting a coffee or a treat, browsing, people watching, generally unwinding. Online shopping may cut it for some, but I’ve lamented more than once in 70 days of self-isolation about missing the instore experience.
So when I realized I had a gift to buy this week, a day after the province gave the green light for stores with street entrances to open as long as they adhere to strict public health guidelines, I decided to get back out there.
It felt like a momentous occasion, and not just because I wore jeans for the first time since early March.
What I discovered was very similar to what I’d left — and, it turns out, I didn’t like it.
Signs that some shops were open in my neighbouring Yorkville became apparent early. The fashionable enclave was as busy as I’ve seen it in 10 weeks on the summerlike day. Dozens of people carried shopping bags from H&M and Zara, which both drew lines on Wednesday afternoon.
I started at Indigo at the Manulife Centre, open only from its Bay Street entrance, where a gloved and masked employee stood with an iPad, telling more than one curious passerby that the store was, in fact, open and facilitating curbside pickups.
Indigo’s entrance door, marked by a paper sign to distinguish it from the exit, opened to a hand sanitizer station and a list of “seven simple physical distancing guidelines,” which recommended shoppers maintain six feet distance and wear masks, like employees are required to do.
It began as a dreamy reunion, mostly because this particular Indigo is a huge space and there were more employees in the store than customers. One employee cleaning the escalator railing marvelled aloud about her “new favourite job,” though she wondered if it’s always that dirty. It wasn’t a regular task in the days before coronavirus.
I head down to the kids section looking for a specific item, but I’m wildly out of my depth. An Indigo employee, seeing my obvious confusion, offers to help. I step toward her. It’s an instinctive reaction, and I’m never sure if people can hear me through my mask. She steps back. I’m too close. I step back. The experience had seemed so, well, normal. The interaction reminds me that it’s not.
At checkout, there’s a Plexiglas barrier between myself and the cashier. But as she begins wrapping the gift I’m giving, I wonder how I’m supposed to hand it over to the recipient safely.
Once I start thinking about the coronavirus spread, it’s hard to stop. At H&M, the front door is closed, which feels like a sign to turn back. How many people have touched that handle today? I’m thankful my purse is packed with three travel-sized hand sanitizers and two masks.
The change rooms are closed, the escalators are limited to one person at a time and the cashiers are protected by Plexiglas barriers, but everything inside feels too close. This store is not the size of Indigo, and it’s packed with racks and shoppers, feverishly shopping some pretty impressive sales. Most of my fellow shoppers are wearing masks, but they aren’t taking detours to maintain physical distance if the blouse they want is closer than six feet.
Oh, and that blouse you want? Size small? It’s in the middle of six other blouses you have to search through, after the woman down the aisle just went through them herself. The comfort I usually find while mindlessly browsing the racks is no more, as I wonder about silent spreaders.
I was tired by the time I reached Zara, which is against my personal mantra of “shop til you drop.” The line — a line? On a Wednesday afternoon? In a pandemic? — was five people deep and ended with more hand sanitizer. On the upside, it was the most organized I’ve ever seen Zara, whose picked-over racks have a tendency to stress me out.
Things were more spread out than at H&M, but the seemingly low-level of anxiety from other shoppers, many of whom I had just seen across the street, still surprised me. Ten weeks ago, it was hardly foreign to brush up against a stranger in a store. Now, it’s strange.
After a quick stop at Nespresso — yes, coffee lovers, it’s open so you no longer have to wait ages for pods in the mail — where the cafe was closed and employees wore face shields, I moved away from the big-box stores to my favourite local card shop.
It’s a tight squeeze on a normal day, but with a limit of four customers per store, green duct tape arrows on the floor to direct the flow of traffic, mandatory masks and complimentary gloves handed out at the front door, it was the most well thought out and serene shop of the day.
And employees went above and beyond for customers who didn’t have a mask but wanted to make a purchase anyway, providing service through the front door.
Shopping has changed in some ways, but in other ways, not so much. But one thing I realized when I was back home — and back in sweats, obviously — was that I’ve changed.
For all the good of the public health guidelines in place, there was still worry. And that will keep me out of the stores, at least for now.
That’s a first.