‘Real’ shopping has its merits

Attention shoppers: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Yes, Yuletide has arrived, signaled by those aspirational perfume ads with their arcane messaging and enigmatic settings.

Chanel’s “Gabrielle” television damsel rips to freedom from a warehouse full of tangled medical gauze only to dash through fireworks, crashing into a wall of glass blocks. Then Natalie Portman as Miss Dior flees from her villa after a lovers’ quarrel. She jumps off a Malibu pier, dances ‘neath the Eifel Tower and spins donuts on the beach in a pink Jaguar roadster. Wait — a pink car? Is she Miss Dior or a Mary Kay regional director?

Likewise, current-day Aqua Velva men venture out. That Davidoff Cool Water fellow still carelessly cliff-dives in blue jeans. And the Azarro “Wanted” cologne gent, having stepped outside in a scuffle over a femme fatale no doubt, sports a skinny little Steri-Strip over his right eyebrow. What a wimpy badge of courage compared to the 1950s Hathaway shirt man’s full eye patch.

But at least these fashion house characters are actually leaving the house this Christmas shopping season, no doubt to peruse Saville Row woolens or sample marrons glacés at a Megève confiserie. The rest of us, bleary-eyed in robes and pajamas, are indoors, pointing and clicking for online deals and, most importantly, free shipping.

Online shopping’s stratospheric growth rates near no end, it seems, increasing like that of Walmart new store openings in the 1980s. Coming from a vantage point of living in, arguably, the brick-and-mortar retail capital of the country, I posit to distant friends that as this phenomenon continues there will someday be, with few exceptions like feed stores, bodegas, dollar stores and lumberyards, only two retailers — Walmart and Amazon.

I have shopped online off and on for several years. Thank goodness for the option. Otherwise I doubt I’d have found quarter-window gaskets for my old convertible or parts for a broken Kodak Carousel projector. A retailer stocking such specialized accoutrements to life in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting would be insane.

But now online retailing is indeed insane with all that free shipping. It’s crazy to have ordinary commodities as pet food and paper towels delivered to your front door. The carbon footprints in such transactions have to be size 13-EEE compared to the traditional vendor-truckloads-to-retail distribution-center logistics popularized by Sam Walton and his executives decades ago and fine-tuned ever since. Someday this free-shipping piper must be paid — by consumers. Kudos to Walmart for tilting in that direction recently.

Months ago, as Walmart was acquiring Jet.com, I became curious about ordering kitchen staples online to ship to the house, when the same goods were readily available at a store nearby. Giving it a go, I clicked my free shipping box full: spaghetti sauce, dog treats, organic crushed tomatoes, laundry detergent, bathroom tissue and more.

I’m not a climate-change denier; Neither am I Al Gore. Yet when my purple and brown Jet.com box arrived, I was appalled at the eco-unfriendliness inside. Everything was covered in shrink- and bubble-wrap of varying degrees, even the eightpack of canned tomatoes. Are tightly-grouped steel containers not protection enough? The Tide liquid detergent was in a sealed sack to prevent leakage, understandably, but shrink-wrapped again for good measure. Even the toilet paper was separately-wrapped! Old TV grocer Mr. Whipple would approve. No way was this Charmin to be squeezed in transit.

There is irony here. The younger, college-educated generations whose market segment drives this inefficient, in my opinion, online explosion are often the same people who have fretted over polar bears and greenhouse gasses and decried the death of Main Street USA thanks to Sam Walton. I never bought that Walmart as Grim Reaper thing, but I’ll hold that for another day. But if indeed Sam Walton drove independent Mom-and-Pops out of business last century, then trending-upscale shoppers of today are assuring their successors’ death and burial in a Jeff Bezos Amazon shipping carton. Made of recycled corrugate, one hopes.

My Christmas wish for you, dear readers, is that you get out and shop “traditional.” Interact with fellow shoppers and shopkeepers, whether boutique or big box, instead of clicking on a chat box. This reminds me. I need to gift myself as my 1970s-era Paco Rabanne designer after-shave is running low. That means an excursion to the Dillards cosmetic department where I will shamelessly feign bewilderment while female consultants fawn over me, a rare male visitor to their glistening counters. Positive proof that a man can get a little female attention without risking injury to an eye.