Before You Can Say, “Bah Humbug!”

Feeling shopped-out?

I’m surprised to find that “shopped-out” is not included in the dictionary, even though we all know exactly what it means: the sensation (or actual state) of having completely and thoroughly (the redundancy is necessary for emphasis) exhausted oneself and one’s wallet in shopping for multiple gifts for multiple people for a certain occasion.

How do you know when you’re “shopped-out?” I compare it to the moment at a feast or big dinner when you realize you absolutely cannot take another bite. You know you’re shopped-out when the thought of buying one more thing – another mug, picture frame or tube of hand lotion -- becomes a mere physical impossibility; like an injured racehorse at the starting gate, you simply cannot enter another store or stand in another line (or “on” another line, if you’re from New York) or open your wallet for anyone but, ahem, yourself. (By that time, a grande eggnog soy latte might hit the spot.)

The key is to stop shopping before the words, “Bah humbug!” start tripping from your lips. Now, anyone who grew up with “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol” knows full well that “Bah humbug” comes from Charles Dickens’s immortal Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser transformed by the Christmas spirits Past, Present and Future in his book, A Christmas Carol. That book, so memorably transformed to a TV cartoon special in the 1960s, is one of the three literary mainstays of the Christmas season, the other two being the Nativity story itself, and then “The Night Before Christmas,” the 1822 poem that gave us flying reindeer, a chimney-hopping St. Nicholas, and stockings for Santa to fill.

But Scrooge himself has made such an impression on English and American culture that his name is now used as a proper or common noun, and is defined in the dictionary as a person who is miserly and mean, just as Dickens created him.
Dickens, however, was a little more descriptive than my American Heritage, and if you haven’t read A Christmas Carol lately, it’s worth reading his description:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his think lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

Such an amazing collection of words and images! Granted, I think Dickens got paid by the word, but he chose words that have transcended time and entered our culture. Will our new words, like website or panini or barista do the same?

And how to describe today’s corporate, money-grubbing bigwigs. Invisible, for the most part – unless they’ve gotten caught for some felony or other. But what bothers me most about these invisible heads of food and service corporations is the language they force into the mouths of their service people working the counters on the frontlines:

No longer is it simply enough for a customer to make a purchase or order something to eat or drink. The clerks and baristas are now supposed to ask, oh so gently but firmly, if you wouldn’t like to buy something ELSE.

Take the cafes at Barnes & Noble, for instance; this is not one Barnes & Noble Café, but all over. If you ask for a small tea, which comes to about $2 and is at least 10 times the cost of the bag, water and cup it’s served in, it still gives a patron the right to sit and enjoy the moment at a table while reading any amount of unpaid- for items. Considering all that, a $2 tea is quite a bargain. What I can’t stand, however (and at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney) are the questions that follow the simple order:

 Would you like to try our new, larger size cup for just 20 cents extra?
 Would you like a biscotti with that?
 Would you like a panini with that?
 Are you a Barnes & Noble Club member (for a cost of $25)?

This offensive type of language is something so pervasive in our culture that I have coined it, “Hucksterish,” a huckster being a particularly aggressive sales person. Modern Hucketerish seems to have started with the “Some fries with that?” automatic question at McDonald’s – a question that often even followed orders including fries. Similar questions abound at the Gap, Pier One, and Abercrombie & Fitch and practically every other type of store, save the grocery store. (Also, Starbucks seems to be above this language, though their non-verbal tip jars apparently bother some.)

While shopping at Pier One the other day, I was in line next to a woman purchasing a sofa for the sale price of $1,047 including tax and delivery fee. Not bad for a couch but still no small sum. And yet what did the young, personable sales woman have to say: “Would you like some throw pillows to go with that?”

A friend of mine’s daughter works at the preppy porn palace of Abercrombie & Fitch and is required to ask all holiday shoppers as they walk in, “Have you seen our sexy new fleece?”

It’s all simply ” fries with that?”

Perhaps that is the American way, along with Santa and Superman, but it’s as offensive and brazen as anything P. Diddy ever rapped. If I asked for tea but neglected to ask for a $7 panini because I “forgot,” then let me go hungry. The poor Hucksterish-speaking barista will not benefit either way – the profits simply go into the mill, and the server keeps earning minimum wage. Bah humbug!

So who are these scrooges who force this verbiage upon us unarmed consumers? We read articles about what “sophisticated” and “savvy” shoppers we have become, but that’s a small order of fries compared to the people selling them to us. And yet these Masters in Command are nowhere to be seen to the average customer. Sure, I can visit the website, but where on Barnes & Noble’s, can I complain about The Four Questions? Who invented the line, “sexy new fleece” and forced it into the mouth of a young and hard-working sales clerk? And why didn’t the Pier One sales woman simply throw in some throw pillows as a courtesy? Now, that’s the spirit of Christmas!

It’s never too late to change, as Scrooge himself discovered:

(Scrooge) became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them … His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

So perhaps it’s a good thing to feel shopped-out: All you can do then is to stop, relax, enjoy! Make some pumpkin bread for yourself and family, sit down for a moment and pick up a book, not a catalogue; or finish wrapping presents with a little “White Christmas.” Do anything that’s corny, sentimental and full of love and laughter – and kiss “bah humbug” goodbye.