I hate Target. I don’t find that red bul-seye the least bit enticing. And don't start trying to distinguish it from any other run-of-the-mill cheap goods store by using that fake French accent.
My dislike of discount shopping is likely deep- seated, and possibly unfair. When my friends, in the affluent suburb of my teenage years, were shopping at upscale department stores – my mother, who didn't believe in spending money on clothes, went decidedly downmarket and took me to stores like Ames, Zayre's and Bradlees to pick out clothes. This was not without protest and a lot of adolescent sulking on my part.
As an adult, though, my friends, no matter how well-heeled, appear to love Target. For the life of me, I can't figure it out. It does nothing but conjure up those days of limited budgets and limited options of ill-fitting, knock-off clothing. It's no different, in my opinion, than Wal-Mart or its progeny. But Sam Walton's little empire has been much maligned, while the red discount store is touted almost universally amomg my acquaintences. It seems that Americans love their big box stores.
What Is the Appeal?
I mean, what's up with the love for Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy or Bed Bath and Beyond, or any of the endless blockbusting behemoths that dot our desert landscape? Like supermarkets, which I avoid like the plague, I’ve made it a point to stay away from Target. If I’m able to live life for years at a time not shopping there, I can’t figure out why I, or anyone else for that matter, would ever be there. But this Saturday there I was, negotiating that terrible parking lot, and joining the hordes of shoppers pushing their big red carts into the store.
New babies subject one to lots and lots of visits from relatives. And what do they like to do? Shop. It is through their eyes that I’ve learned that my ascetic lifestyle is not up to traditional American consumption standards. To their horror, we don't have a vast collection of DVDs (What will the baby watch?), a sufficient number of flat screen televisions (What do you watch?), or even the requisite Blu-Ray DVD player (It’s all in high-def, you know). I think the absence of a playpen and high chair practically gave them hives. It gave our relations an excuse to see how our Target differed from their Target. Despite me and my husband's best efforts to tame them, our truly American families can not shake their addiction to big box shopping (among other vices). So in their efforts to help us acquire more junk, we get dragged, time and again, to one big box store after another. My husband, to Best Buy and Home Depot. In the interest of continued gender bias, I spend hours at Target and Babies R Us. No doubt Wal-Mart would have been thrown in for fun, but, thank goodness, there aren't any in our nearby driving radius. (Please don’t email that there really is one. Ignorance is bliss.)
Baby Needs Nothing. Period.
So off we go to bright red Target, or bright blue Best Buy, or bright orange Home Depot. Are you getting the sense that elementary school colors sell schlock well? It’s as if the shoppers in these places are in a daze. All I can see for miles around are shoddily made, cheap, imported goods, that exploit workers at one end averaging twenty-two cents an hour for their labor and overpriced stuff at our end, siphoning our hard-earned dollars to a few wealthy shareholders. But everyone else looks happy, or at least determined to get the most for their shopping dollar.
Nothing has changed since my youth except the stigma of discount shopping has been lifted. The goods are the same. During this trip, it was tacky cotton dresses (Summer’s coming, don’t you know!), thin denim jeans (No matter your size, tight is good!), and hundreds and hundreds of tee-shirts sold at prices high enough to make a steep profit, but low enough not to scare off the masses. My mother was surprised that I didn’t know there were acres of baby outfits I could purchase. I was surprised that anyone would think I could possibly need anything other than the hand-me-down clothes my son currently wears. To my credit, I made it out with only much needed cosmetics.
I don’t get it, and I don’t think any amount of trips will help me understand the allure of places like these. Nothing says welcome like guards standing at the doors on the way in, and sometimes receipt mongers stabbing at you with highlighters on the way out. But despite my influence, no doubt Americans will continue their love affair with stores purporting to offer a discount, and I will continue to keep the stuff out of my house at all costs.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
