Probing Mystique of the Shopper

From the day after Thanksgiving until the night before Christmas, these normally sane people battled each other for parking spaces and bargains. They elbowed each other at cash registers and gift-wrap counters. Now, exhausted and nearly penniless, why didn’t they just call it a year and take some time off--like maybe until next November?

Why, instead, did they exit houses strewn with wrapping paper and littered with too-dry pine needles and throw themselves this week into the sequel, the post-Christmas assault on the stores known as “Return to the Mall?”

Well, the shopping madness was caused partly by greed, partly by hatred of ugly gift ties, and largely by a need for spectacle, according to Alladi Venkatesh, UC Irvine associate professor of marketing.

“Shopping has always been a ritual,” Venkatesh said, and marking special occasions by consuming is a centuries-old tradition. Even before Christ and Christmas, “people celebrated by consumption.”

“I think we live in a society of spectacles,” Venkatesh said. “In the late 20th Century, we don’t have any more mystic things in life, so consumption is the reason for which we live. And that’s the way society thrives--by making people consume endlessly.”

The quest for consumption started early at Buffums at Fashion Island, where store manager John Clymer said that on the day after Christmas, crowds lined up well before the store opened at 8 a.m., two hours earlier than normal. And where did most of them head?

“They always head toward the ‘trim-a-home’ department,” Clymer said, which contains “the Christmas cards, the Christmas wrap, the home decoration items. That’s always the first area that gets the immediate rush.” Sure enough, shoppers swept through the store, picking up cards, ornaments and decorations for next year.

But it wasn’t just Christmas staples that were on sale, and it wasn’t just socks and underwear, blouses and suits. The Labrador retriever that cost $499 Sunday at Pets Unlimited at the Westminster Mall was marked down to $399 on Tuesday. So was the Lhasa apso.

Although some shoppers who bought clothing at pre-Christmas prices tried to get refunds when the items were marked down after the holiday, that didn’t work with animals, said Pets Unlimited assistant manager Lori McDonald.

“We have a no-return policy on livestock,” she said. And to make sure everyone’s operating on the same wave length, buyers of puppies and kittens sign contracts, saying that once the animal is out the door, it’s not coming back.

But one item that did go back at the MainPlace/Santa Ana mall was a “Moonies” doll, bought by 14-year-old Danielle Waldroff for presentation Christmas Eve to her boyfriend. When you pull the string on the doll, it drops its trousers.

It seemed like a fine gag gift, at least until Danielle opened her boyfriend’s present to her: a gold bracelet with “I Love You” engraved on it.

“After she saw the bracelet, she told her boyfriend that she hadn’t found the perfect gift for him yet,” reported Marion Waldroff, mother of the fast-thinking teen-ager. “So we’re taking this silly doll back and looking for a nice sweater.”

“ Mom ! What are you telling? My life story?” Danielle complained.

While they were at the mall, the Cerritos residents also were taking back a denim skirt deemed too short and too tight by Danielle’s mother. “I liked it a lot,” Danielle remarked.

“It wasn’t very ladylike,” argued Marion Waldroff, who had selected the skirt herself without realizing how skimpy it was.

Teen-agers are a tough lot to please at Christmastime, most will agree. An unscientific poll of shoppers/exchangers indicated that a large percentage were there to tote back clothing that they had received.

“He didn’t like one thing we gave him,” Steve Mitchell said of his 16-year-old son, Michael.

“They got me a lot of shirts and stuff that aren’t my taste,” Michael interjected.

“He tells it like it is,” laughed his mother, Karren Mitchell, a medical transcriptionist. “He’d open presents and simply say, ‘I don’t like this.’ And then when he did like something, he’d say, ‘This is bad. ‘ So we were confused. We couldn’t figure out which gifts he liked and which he didn’t like.”

“Next year, we’re going to give him money and say, ‘Go pick out your own presents and we’ll wrap them,’ ” said Steve Mitchell, a sales representative in Tustin.

Anaheim sisters Jaimie and Jennifer Morgan, ages 17 and 15 respectively, had come to exchange the good intentions of various relatives.

“My mom gave me a bathrobe, but I already have a bathrobe that I hardly ever wear,” Jaimie noted. She reacted to the unwanted item as politely as possible. “I said, ‘Oh, how nice. Thank you. I hope you kept the receipt.’ ”

Picky teen-agers weren’t the only ones whose tastes differed from their relatives’.

“Isn’t this awful?” remarked Tustin teacher Barbara Burch, as she displayed a lavender sweat shirt. “My daughter-in-law in Chicago sent it to me. I’ll write her a thank-you note telling her how much I’m enjoying the shirt. She’ll never know I exchanged it.”

Nancy Violet, a tour guide who lives in Rancho Mirage, braved the bustling mall for the sake of her two sons--both residents of Anaheim Hills. “One of them is getting married, and my mother bought him a tuxedo shirt and cummerbund,” she said. “You rent those things. He and his groomsmen are going to wear identical tuxedos, so I’m taking this back. We’re not going to tell Mom--she won’t notice the difference. All pleated tuxedo shirts look the same.”

The other son received a clashing shirt and necktie. “Why do people give ties?” she asked, rhetorically. “Men are so choosy about their ties. Most ties given as gifts are never worn.”

Often great minds--or, at least, related minds--think alike. Helen Rutkowski, a visitor from Kennewick, Wash., received two pairs of the same pajamas from family members. Deciding which to bring back was easy: “One set is too large,” she said.

“ I bought her the right size,” her daughter-in-law, Carol Joyce, a marketing researcher in El Toro, pointed out.

One common Christmas gift faux pas was avoided. “My nephew lives in another state, and I haven’t seen him in a year. It didn’t occur to me that he would get bigger in that time,” said Anaheim resident Michael Brophy, a student at Cal State Fullerton. “When you don’t see kids very often, you forget that they grow.

“I telephoned my sister and told her what size clothes I got him, and she said they were too small. He’s 3, and I bought a pair of jeans and a shirt for a 2-year-old. So I’m saving my sister the trouble of having to exchange them herself.”

Damian Zavala of Santa Ana, another Cal State Fullerton student, confessed that he feigned enthusiasm for the sweat suit his mother bestowed upon him Christmas morning: “Secretly, I was thinking, ‘How much can I get for it?’ ”

Venkatesh of UCI said that returning gifts and a desire for bargains are merely the “very simple” reasons for the post-holiday crush at the malls.

He said his own theory, and, perhaps, a deeper reason, was that consumers had been conditioned to spend more money as part of the “world of spectacle.”

Venkatesh, holder of a Ph.D in business from Syracuse University, said endless consumption is “the only myth we have left. Everything else has been demystified.”

For example, once upon a time “we believed in the eldest knowing more than the youngest.” It was a time of oral tradition, when youngsters sat around and listened raptly to the tales of their parents and grandparents.

But now, “the oral tradition . . . no longer exists.” Instead, it has “been replaced by myths created by commercial organizations. Myths have gone into malls and the shopping spectacles. I’m not necessarily casting it in negative terms. . . . I’m saying the myths have shifted.”

Venkatesh conceded that his theory is “not deeply accepted” in the bottom-line land of business schools, or even behind the cash registers of the malls. Yet it is a theory that is getting increasing study, he said.