Utter Mindlessness

CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

Smile! You're a shopping maniac. Well, perhaps not you, if you're a sensible, ordinary individual who wouldn't think of emerging from your nice warm house on a miserably cold winter's day in the wee hours of the morning to establish yourself in a waiting group patiently awaiting the five hours it will take for the store you're anxious to rush into to grab all those bargains, at ten in the morning.

Seems it's the electronic gadgetry emporiums that manage to entice the majority of people into these mindless goods-consumption highjinks. People who are prepared to bring along sleeping bags, tents, hot thermoses full of coffee, and good cheer, to await daylight and the opening of the front doors to the stores that have advertised "Boxing Day Specials" at knock-down prices.

"I have been here since 1:30 a.m. this morning", said one young man, brimming over with glee, standing beside his father. It's a family affair. Two grown-up men happy to stamp their feet in the cold and determined not to succumb to the misery of an overnight camping plan that will end with their acquiring a 42-inch flat screen television, a laptop computer, a personal video recorder.

Now that's quality-of-life. That's value for time spent mindlessly anticipating the "savings" to be had for patiently standing about and eagerly awaiting the opportunity to flow into a store whose inventory will be slipping out that same front door in the satisfied arms of customers who have already depleted their bank accounts buying Christmas gifts the weeks before.

Doesn't take long as shoppers grab shopping carts in their eagerness to grasp all those attractive bargains before someone else manages to grab the last one. For the determined buyer who had waited for hours for the Santa-and-elves-clad sales staff to unlock the doors, a fast prowl down the aisles, dumping merchandise into the carts and wheeling them directly to the cash takes five minutes.

And the queue that had gathered outside gradually diminishes, while newcomers begin to re-establish a newer line of eagerly anticipating customers. The stores are "crazy-busy", and tempers sometimes run short when people take too long to load up their purchases in car trunks a little too small to hold them, while others waiting to take their parking spots lose their patience.

It's just so much fun and, according to one shopper "family-oriented".