Don’t blame shoppers, blame the government
Every season has a scapegoat. Last spring it was young people drinking en masse and allegedly defecating in and around Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park.
This season’s scapegoat is a little bit different: she uses the toilet indoors and lights a scented candle on her way out.
I’m referring to the throng of shoppers photographed at a HomeSense in Vaughan this week.
You may have seen video footage of these faceless customers from behind, most of them women, standing in a long line to purchase (from what I could see) items like laundry bins, sleepwear and a canvas of some kind.
That is to say: items that no respected public health expert would deem “essential,” though what that word means anymore is beyond me and, maybe, even beyond human comprehension.
But essential items or not, people went shopping for them anyway on Day 1 of York Region’s controversial entrance into the “Red Zone” — a designation that sounds scary because
it is scary: it permits indoor retail shopping, among other in-person mixing, during a pandemic.
Footage of that indoor shopping went immediately viral, provoking scorn in some corners (an ER doctor told Global news the footage was “gutwrenching”) and mockery in others: “Suburban wine moms flock to HomeSense,” declared BlogTO earlier this week.
And then, as these things tend to go, came the reaction to the reaction.
“Getting upset at the people in line at Homesense feels a lot like buying into the continual government drumbeat the severity of the pandemic is our
fault, not theirs,” writer Robert Hiltz tweeted the other day. “Feels like putting the onus on the people following the policies, not the people making the policies.”
It’s a fair point. If you think throw pillows and picture frames are inessential purchases during a pandemic, direct your frustration at the leaders who made it possible for people to rush out and buy those inessentials in store — not the shoppers themselves.
HomeSense shoppers didn’t storm the place illegally. They walked through the doors and lined up because the province gave them the go-ahead. No one should be surprised by this. Nor should Torontonians be smug about “suburban wine moms.”
It’ll be us in the “Red Zone” soon enough and we aren’t exactly wary of big-box stores and long lines either. Remember the crowd outside EB Games in downtown Toronto at the onset of the pandemic last year?
Lining up for merchandise isn’t a York Region specific pastime. It’s a universal one.
If you’re going to be surprised about anything, be surprised about that. Despite repeated announcements that retail shopping is dead — that no one wants to bother with sales clerks accosting them with pleasantries when they can shop online in peace and quiet — it turns out that human beings still like to browse brick-and-mortar stores.
Especially when the experience has been denied to them.
Many retail brands have taken notice of this. According to the National Retail Federation, the pandemic has accelerated the industry’s “blending” of online and offline shopping experiences. It’s not unusual now for big retail brands to offer, in addition to curbside pickup, virtual-enabled instore features like contactless payment and shopping by appointment.
Though clearly a lot of consumers will still show up in the flesh without those perks.
If you polled this week’s infamous HomeSense shoppers, for example, they might tell you that they braved the lineups because they really needed all that stuff that day — that for them it was essential.
But maybe what they really needed — or wanted —was a brush with sensory capitalism by any means necessary. Easy rock pumping softly from the speakers, the promise of an empty shopping cart rolling at their feet, and an opportunity to congratulate themselves for picking up and then putting back one of the useless miscellaneous products sitting by the cash.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
It may be a popular one, but the prediction that COVID-19 is going to fundamentally rewrite human nature — that it will render extinct handshakes, cities and, in this case, the burning desire of women to smell scented candles before they buy them — was probably incorrect.
Unfortunately, the prediction that Ontario’s relaxing of restrictions will have tragic consequences probably wasn’t.