The Cycle of Holiday Shopping

I like shopping from home. In looking back at the holiday shopping seasons throughout my life, I find that my 20s and early 30s were probably the real aberration in my shopping behaviors.

As a kid, I grew up in a borderline rural area. I say "borderline", because the town I grew up in was about 35,000 people ...but it was the single largest town in the county. The closest "city" was the next county over - separated from my town by a river and 30 miles of very busy interstate highway. I put quotes around city because by the time of my teen years, changing economic conditions meant that said city had shrunk below to 60,000 residents. To truly be a city, my recollection was that there needs to be 100,000 residents within an incorporated entity. Not really sure, at this point, though. I think the reason that said "city" was referred to as a city was because it happened to be the state capital. Can't have your capital not be a city!

I guess I try to say I grew up in a "borderline" rural area because I don't like to admit I grew up in BFE. However, the prevalence of Trump placards and bumper-stickers the past two Thanksgivings means that I really can't hide where I'm from. Also probably counts, in large part, why I never felt at "home" where I grew up. Mom says I chafed to get away from there from well before my teen years. I know I always felt out of place there.

Digression aside... Being in that type of area meant that, until the mall and big-box retail explosion of the 90s and early 2000s (after I'd graduated college and moved away from the region), there just wasn't a huge amount concentrated shopping. There were plenty of mom-and-pops and other little stores in each town's "down town" areas, just not the kinds of concentrated-retail that typifies the Black Friday meltdowns that seemed to become the norm in the 2000s. As a kid, Christmas season meant waiting for the Christmas catalogues to show up from Sears, JC Penny's and a couple of other, lesser outlets. When the catalogs showed up, it was always "ignore all the grown-up/practical stuff" and seek out the colorful toy-sections of the catalogues. Then dog-ear the pages containing the stuff I wanted (to make it easier for mom and dad to find) and very carefully circle the specific items desired. I place that emphasis there because there were some Christmas snafus that resulted from failure to be precise enough in marking desired items. Was mostly a grandparent problem. They meant well ...and, unlike a pair particularly harried parents, one season, never resulted in a complete "I thought you were buying the presents this year" gaff.

After college, I moved away from home to find work and, frankly, to finally escape the chafing confines of where I grew up. This seemed to coincide with the major rise in destination shopping (90s was when Mall of America became famous, after all). It meant slogging through traffic to get to malls whose parking lots were designed for the rest of the year. It meant dealing with crowds of people who didn't really seem to have any particular place to be, just "out". Lastly, it also meant waiting in line for registers that, like the parking structures, were mostly designed for the rest of the year.

I've been working in IT, to one degree or another, pretty much my entire adult life. I've worked for a couple of ISPs (one that was an early hosting-services provider for e-commerce) and companies that provided support services for them ...and for online retail companies. So, early on, I was aware of possibilities for avoiding malls. And, as they came more into my price-range and stocked more of the stuff I was interested in, I switched to shopping almost exclusively through them. I wasn't really concerned about contributing to the death of small businesses - as, by that time, Walmart and the big-box stores had already put most of them on the endangered species list, any way. I was mostly concerned about avoiding the cranky throngs ("merry fucking Christmas!"), the traffic and everything that makes the holiday run-up unpleasant.

With the backlash against Black Friday nonsense - and the realization that it's kind of silly to try to force shoppers into doing a year's worth of business in the waning hours of the Thanksgiving holiday - it's managing to become even less onerous. And, while I've usually waited until the "hmm... If I do the overnight option, will it still get here in time" or the "if I ship ahead, will it be there when we get there" was a real concern, this year I actually dispensed with things early. Everything I'm buying is bought, already, as of this writing (and, I have enough time that I may have actually paid it all off before 2017 turns to 2018).