Is Shopping Embarrassing?

One of the great indignities of being a person is the constant need to wear clothes. For most of us, this means we must shop to cover our indecent bodies. Unfortunately, unlike other basic necessities, like eating and sleeping, shopping is embarrassing.

I actually love to shop. I’m a great shopper. I excel at browsing. I know how to find the good stuff. I crush racks of clothing with speed and thoroughness. I feel fabrics, note colors and textures, assess the weight and the details. There’s a lot of information to take in and I have a very high capacity to process it all. I know a lot about clothes—they’ve been a consequential part of my job for the past 15 or so years—and I love to touch and talk about them. But still, I almost always find it at least a little bit embarrassing to shop. Why?

I’m not self-conscious about trying things on or asking for my size—even if it is undignified to walk into a store and try on a little outfit in front of a bunch of strangers. I have no problem with that part. I don’t even mind the comic performance that occurs when you try something on—like pushing into the space between your toes and the end of the shoe with your thumb. Do these fit? Walk around the store, do a jumping jack. Stare longingly into the face of anyone brave enough to make eye contact with you: Do I look okay?

The hard part is baldly exposing your taste as it’s developing in real time to the world—or at least to the shop’s staff and a handful of other embarrassed shoppers. This is enhanced by the fact that shopping is inherently about finding something new. There is always a risk that the new thing is going to make you look stupid. For some, new is just a variation on old. A replacement, let’s say. For others, new is a radical departure from the old. A reinvention. Either way, shopping is the act of finding the new thing, which can only be done by taking a small journey through a store, a journey of self-discovery, while others watch.

Along the way on this journey, one must complete a series of small and potentially humiliating tasks, such as jamming your arm down the neckhole of a shirt looking for a price tag like you’re noodling in the muck for catfish. And when you don’t find it, being forced to ask the most humiliating question of all: “How much?” To which the sales associate will inevitably tell you that they don’t know, but that they will check. Now you have a long, suspenseful moment to spend doubting yourself and regretting every decision that brought you to this moment. You don’t want to buy this thing anyway, you were just curious, but now that you’ve gone this far, perhaps you should just put down your card and get it over with.

Which leads to the next embarrassing thing about shopping: money. Clothes are expensive. They should be, anyway. If they aren’t, someone somewhere along the chain of production is being exploited. There are basically two key scenarios involving money and shopping, and both of them carry some amount of embarrassment. The first is, I can’t afford that. Which is not an embarrassing thing to admit. It happens to everyone. But when you’re in the store wearing the jacket, turning in the mirror, reorienting your entire life and personality around the cloth, only to realize that the price tag has at least one more zero than you were expecting…the embarrassment is baked into the moment of disappointment. The moment you realized you were just playing make believe.