Swap ‘Til You Drop

“I don’t have time to shop.” This is what my mother used to say to me when as a kid I would beg for the Guess or Lee pin striped jeans. And since we become our mothers at some point, I’ve formed my own rendition of her statement. “I can’t afford to shop,” is what I like to tell people. But that’s a lie because I can, I just choose not to.

I decided this after a New York City shopping binge. I was there on a girlfriend get-together weekend. I landed a day early to meet with my literary agent and made the fortunate mistake of discovering Forever 21, all alone, with no hip clothes in my suitcase to speak of and an American Express card with a zero balance. After three hours, I renamed the store Forever 35, wondering how long I could shop here before I started to come off like a middle-aged cougar. When the total cost of my fifteen items was only cents over one hundred dollars, I cracked a joke to the twenty one year old smacking her gum behind the counter, “Well, then. I guess we won’t mention the slave labor that must have made these prices possible?” She smirked while demagnetizing the electronic article surveillance tag off my tweed gauchos.

After that trip, I made a pact with myself that I would no longer shop. It just wasn’t where I was going to put my money anymore. Plus, the clothing I could afford was keeping young girls at their sewing machines way past their bedtimes. I reasoned that I could have a nice coat here, a pair of boots there, and that specialty items were okay if they aligned with my new motto of quality, not quantity. But full-on shopping binges that had to be tamed like unhealthy habits from the past––those were off limits. I faltered later the following year on a trip to London to see my best friend. She introduced me to TopShop and how their seventy quid jeans never changed style. Since then I’ve grown proud of myself, because I’ve yet to cross the electronic alarm barrier in any H&M.