Selling out the middle class

WHEN LIFE and partisan politics become too much for me, when the ills of the nation and the world bottleneck in my brain to the point where I can barely distinguish one troubling truth from another -- which happens at least twice a week nowadays -- my opiate of choice is shopping.

Call me a constantly lapsing recovering consumer. I’m not proud of this, though I’m not ashamed of it either. The worst thing it means is that I’m an entirely average American, easily driven by complex and unpleasant realities to the escapist distractions of stuff. I am a member of what social critics and theorists like to call the “bewildered herd,” though I like to think that I’m less bewildered and more self-aware than most of my fellow cattle, even when I find myself buying another pair of high heels that I can’t really walk in and don’t need.

There’s no denying that shopping works, and not simply as a distraction but as something quite the opposite: a meaningful communal experience in a city that prefers its communities self-contained and reveres the notion of personal space. Under the big tent of a mall, that’s all momentarily set aside. Everybody from price-savvy fashionistas to immigrant families bump elbows in pursuit of quality goods at a good price.

And our ideal meeting ground has always been a mid-price department store like Robinsons-May, where customer service -- glass counters, gift wrapping -- and regular 70% markdowns satisfy the discriminating shopper and bargain hunter in all of us. The ultimate Rob-May destination was the store in the Santa Monica Place mall. With its tonier-than-average merchandise, ocean views from the parking lot and proximity to the pier and the Third Street Promenade, the trip was always worth it, especially for non-Westsiders like me. (I would like to say that my local Robinsons-May at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza is as transporting, or at least satisfying, but it’s not.)

Of course, this breed of store has been vanishing for some time, a victim of endless corporate consolidations and acquisitions and shifting retail strategies that are fast splitting the market into very upscale and very downscale, with little in between. The retail middle class, like the middle class everywhere, is disappearing. So when Federated Department Stores Inc., the parent company of Macy’s, bought Robinsons-May last year and announced plans to shut down the stores altogether, it was outrageous but unsurprising.

Still, the prospect of Santa Monica without a gathering place of modest grandeur like Robinsons-May was unsettling. I know I can’t afford to live in Santa Monica -- especially given the latest wave of gentrification that’s sweeping L.A. from downtown westward -- but at least I could afford to shop there.

So I made a visit on Sunday, the day before our seaside Robinsons-May closed for good. I’d had a tough week and was feeling the compulsion to shop, or at least browse. But this time out offered no distractions, just more unnerving reality; the set of one of my favorite fantasies was being struck before my eyes. Clothing racks were emptied back to bare walls; the once-meticulous order was stripped down to makeshift (menswear clerks hawking pillows, Persian rugs piled next to underwear); the cleaning crew was vacuuming almost beneath the feet of the last meager wave of customers.

This was no longer a store but a garage sale, and the few folks there milled about with the mix of aimlessness and concerted hope common to such an event. There wasn’t much to buy, but we thought we still might be able to strike retail gold. We were looking for something we had bought new long ago but had lost and were expecting to find again. Like most habitual shoppers, we were looking for something that we wanted more than we needed, something we couldn’t necessarily describe but would recognize when we saw it. All at a good price, of course.

It wasn’t here, not anymore. But it was a last hurrah for the unlikely communing that was as much a draw for me as the shopping: white society ladies, Latino families, black teenagers, all perusing the picked-over goods with equal determination. I heard Farsi and Spanish, Russian and English.

Most hearteningly, more than once I heard customers quietly ask the store clerks the same question: Where will you go next? We will all be reassigned to Macy’s, one answered, though she sounded more wishful than confident that it was something better. It was a sentiment that even those of us who left empty-handed took home.