non-shop adventures and the underappreciated art of window shopping

Here’s a little story about non-shop adventures and participating in your local economy even when you aren’t flush with currency. It’s like flash-mobbing a business you love, but without a mob. ¹²

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Art | Fart Dropping

When it came to beautiful goods in the late 1900s³ my mom and would go window shopping more than actual shopping. We’d call our outings “adventures” and travel to towns with zero spending money. Having nothing to spend was per usual for us, as they say. Discretionary spending was for rich ladies, she’d say, we spend on rent, food, and experiences. You know, she’d say, the necessities.

Our non-shop adventures meant driving to funky gift stores in seaside towns like Mystic, Connecticut and Rockport, Massachusetts. It also included us marveling at piles of peeling band stickers that papered signposts and sniffing the patchouli pouring out of at Indian clothing outlets on Thayer Street in Providence.

We’d walk into stores, ooh and ahh, show each other stuff we found interesting, laugh a load, then smile and wave goodbye. We were pleasant, definitely not criminal, but to be honest, we may not have always been the best guests.

See, my mom would occasionally let one rip then bolt the aisle, leaving me to pick up the shame and ride the slow wave of confused looks with passers nearby. If she’d waited for those incense stores, there would be plausible deniability, but she never went for that. My mom preferred to frame fast, then and saunter out of the zone like a middle-aged hell on wheels.

My mom would wait for me to meet her gaze across the tops of shelving or around a corner. I’d glare, she’d gleam. My mom was rife with absurdity like this. Still is.

For a 17 year old, this was a real kick in the embarrassment. For 40-something year old, just another day with her teenage daughter.

My mom also loved smiling calmly while flipping silly FU birds to old, angry, driving men. I almost had a chance to do that today. Some guy ’round the Belmont Market lot was pretty sure he knew how the entire lot should run. Hands up in “wtf” at some normal person making a turn. I watched his silent swear-mouthing and flailing arms with amusement, but kept my middle fingers to myself. I have standards, after all, But I did feel compelled to write this loving, little hit peace.

Oh My Providence

Once we’d get back to the car, my mom and I would both laugh like crazy about whatever she’d done: I can’t believe you did that! She’d shrug her shoulders, say “mmm” with a look on her face like the Mona Lisa. No apologies, no shame, just a glimmer of knowing. What a woman.

On some of these non-shop trips she’d let me drive. I remember her whooping with delight the time I accidentally lodged a 5 gallon bucket under the front end of her Honda. My improvised moves to shake it loose was nailing a sidewalk curb on the East Side. My approach made her screech with delight, and me feel accomplished. It worked, and no one was hurt.

And the bucket wound up only, say, only 5 doors away. We’d speculate about how people would piece together the mystery of how it moved. We were sure they’d never know it was us.

Okay, so back to the non-shopping. You know, doing some good for any hurting small businesses near you by showing up in person.

My mom and I would saunter around like we could afford to buy the goods for sale, seeing for ourselves all the beautiful things, while making small talk with the store owners and guests, then carry on to the next place. Sometimes a young guy would try to pick her up – mom was some seriously hot stuff– but more often we’d make small talk with older women behind the counters, compliment their wares and thank them for being there.

Smiling and participating in the economy by pretending to shop is just as fun as doing it, and I suspect brings a touch of energy and whimsy into the places you go. This may make moneyed folks chat a bit more, maybe linger for good stories of the place, and maybe even buy something too. So, if you can stop by, do.

Everyday Station

When there was a stationery store nearby (there always was), we’d stop in, so mom could buy a 4×6″ pad of paper or a single pencil and write the whole darn drive off on⁴ her taxes. She was gloriously self-employed, and exactly her best self seeing at most 3 clients a day. “That’s my capacity,” she’d say, and we had plenty of time to be together and have silly adventures while she worked from home.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I helped her run her ‘shop,’ we’d non-shop, and find cut-loose fun in nature. We had overhead after all, rent, bills, and basic adventures in the every day.

Garden Cities

My mom and I especially loved bookstores. First Harold’s Books in Wakefield, where we knew the staff, then, when I first came back from college, she ran me right up to Borders Books in Garden City: it was made for us, she practically gasped. And it was perfect for the time. Borders had chairs, and you could sit, read and linger as much as you wanted. The store was designed so they didn’t mind if you took your time deciding. And it was next to a Newport Creamery where sometimes we could eat a little something. By then, I had my own money from waitressing, something she enjoyed. I loved treating people to meals out by then, and mom was my Number One guest.

As an old marketing person of a couple of decades, I sometimes assumed a profit motive was an goal for most folks in business. So, I’ve kept myself away unless I can outright afford to pay full price (and then some).

And, I’m learning this is simply not true.

Good business is sometimes about talking, learning, and speaking of community news, even if no dollars exchange hands. Sometimes GREAT business is about connection, service, and simply waiting through the winds of change together. When the economy stinks, don’t hole up at home, get out there more if you can. Show up for your people.

And if you can’t contribute to elevating someone’s shop, then you can non-shop and elevate their experience. Showing up with your best people, and being kind, fiery and may even be a gas.

The Way by which we do what we do, the way in which we connect with other people is probably the most personal thing we possess besides our bodies. Our way of moving through life comes from choices, and includes a conglomeration of our unique life experience, our upbringing, our values and our experiences.

I notice so many folks doing more or less the same thing: offering more or less the same thing on the web to middle aged ladies. And that’s likely because of 1) algorithm and 2) known data ascribed to my particular web-behaviors.

So, I am routinely offered retreats, spa-like days of connection, moments of presence, body work and beauty products. And honestly, I love all of these things and would be happy to participate, but they tend to cost dollars, because they take dollars to make happen.

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1. I wonder in terms of growing small businesses foot traffic and revenue, if bustle <=> dollars? Or is bustle a progenitor of dollars? I know an incredible restaurateur who put dummies in the window to draw a crowd. It worked and made her a legend.
   
   Another related example is that of a busker seeding a tip case with some big bills so people drop down some more large ones later.
   
   Research Question: can a preponderance of real people generate more growth later, even if the real people are staff? Feel free to tell me by email your anecdotal experiences with this.
   
   Don’t worry, I won’t show up to bustle or busk ’round your place without a proper invitation, I’d rather be writing. ↩︎
2. ↩︎
3. Yeah, right? Those of us born in 1970s or 1980s zone lived our formative years in the “late 1900s.” What a rude wakeup in language use, but also, inherently funny. ↩︎
4. this is one of those fun things in language: “off on” ↩︎