The Long View

After dropping off my holiday visitor at the airport, I undertook an expedition to post-holiday shopping in Buckland Hills, CT, where exhausted consumer tribes had assembled in the annual Gathering of the Nation of Shoppers.

• Banana Republic features clothes with “modern fit”; I suspect I am suited for “early-modern fit.”
• Anthropologie (a women’s clothing and gift store whose ersatz Euro-name belies what appears to be its South Carolina business offices) seeks “visual interns” (according to a sign in its window). I wonder if they have sought “audio interns” as well?
• Stores like Panera, Atlanta Bread Co., and Starbucks are McDonalds for the upper-middle class.
• The tag line for the women’s store Soft Surroundings tells us in a frieze around the windows, “My Time, My Place, My Self.” My, my, my.
• Why are the front windows of Abercrombie and Fitch stores covered with half-closed black plantation shutters? Are the photos of nubile, athletic, pneumatic young lads that distressing to Middle America?