Monday, November 03, 2008

A quick tale 217

Shop in the time of credit crunch

Who are all these people, you wonder one day as you sit in a café sipping a warm mug of hot chocolate and watching pedestrians on the road. Why are they walking around with pendulous shopping bags? you ponder. What is inside those bags? It is not summer and it is months before Christmas. And if newspapers are to be believed, we are in the middle of a credit-crunch (you, like most others don’t wish to be bothered by the economic-minutiae but generally assume that it means tighter purse strings). Which brings you back to your question - who are all these shoppers?

You sip your tepid chocolate. Perhaps this woman here is celebrating the 5th anniversary of her graduation and has decided to gift herself a unicycle which is now flat-packed and she has to assemble it all herself. Perhaps that man over there has suddenly felt the urge to spend a ridiculous amount of money on vast quantities of shower gel and enamel paint. May be this young lady here has just found out that her account has been wrongly credited with a fortune and wants to blow it all up on vitamin supplements and hot-cross buns.

You take another sip of your room-temperature chocolate. Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps there is a perfectly good explanation for shoppers being out on a Tuesday afternoon. But you’ll never find out what it is. It’s nearly time for you to go back to work and your drink has gone cold.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is what America does best. SHOP! But how can one blame them. The deals that are all around all the time are so irresistable that only after a visit there did I begin to understand why Americans are in debt all the time.

Silly Sally said...

Credit Crunch or Not, Recession or Not, The planet still revolves around its orbit churning in its day-day activities; Somewhere in the world.....New Babies are always born.... Students always Graduate... Men and Women Get Married.... These are select few from the long List-of-inevitables! Life goes on... :-)

Nashe^ said...

Shopping has slowed down in Singapore, but people are going full steam ahead with travel plans.

There's just no stopping some things.