Clever Subject Line: Did You Forget Something?
Your cart will expire in 10 days.
Ask any friend of yours who’s locked down, working/studying, and doing how we would now describe as “pretty good!”—they definitely have 6-8 tabs open on their laptop and cell phone. Some e-mails, scanned library books, maybe even their favorite study-tuber (okay, just me?), and about 3 different types of shopping tabs. There’s the product search results page, on which they are still browsing for the perfect combination of stars and reviews; there’s the full cart, sitting in anticipation of an uncertain click; and there’s the 10-minute-old shipment racking page, reserved for the more committed procrastinators (or maybe just the daftest).
I’d like to call myself a pretty tame shopper. After recovering from my weekend suburban-mall-trip addiction in middle school, I’ve grown increasingly less and less interested in the shopping experience. And while online window-shopping was the high school distraction I had to conquer next, I’ve never been the type of person with a full cart open in a faraway, pitifully hidden tab.
That’s not to say I haven’t had my fair share of quarantine purchases. Most of mine, however, have been pre-meditated, habitual: the start of a new routine like matcha lattes in the morning or a new candle to burn each month. I’m a stranger to the kind of shopping I’ve been doing in the past few days. A new interest in skincare? Physical devices to extinguish my distress? Gen Z-targeted birth control and liquid blush? Who am I!?
Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss the uniqueness of our quarantine purchases. It’s not just paints and puzzles anymore; we’ve collectively evolved past March 2020. Our feigning interest in quarantine trends allows us to now ask the question: what do our unique purchases say about us? Are we vapid? Hopeful? … Have we given up? I don’t have the answers, there’s not a lot of those lying around these days. But I can share my own, in an effort to partake in an exposé of ourselves and our habits.
I share this list without much comment because, well, it’s really open for interpretation. Your guess is as good as mine.