Friends Don’t Let Friends Shop Drunk
Driving, dialing your ex, and posting to social media while drunk- we’ve all heard the dangers; however, have you considered how detrimental it can be to shop while intoxicated? Here are a couple stories for your consideration.
“Anise” works in a high-end women’s clothing store in a tourist town where several little retail stores line the downtown. Recently a group of young women entered the store who had obviously been drinking. All of them were intoxicated, but one woman was particularly impaired. Apparently, her girlfriends bored quickly in the store and left the poor woman to fend for herself while they sauntered on to shop at the next store. This left Anise wondering what to do with the remaining shopper. Perhaps she would just sit quietly in a chair while she waited for her friends to retrieve her. No. This was not to be. The woman slumped, staggered and slurred, but she was determined to find some new outfits and wanted, or should I say needed, Anise’s help.
This is when it really got weird. The lady would stumble over to pick out an outfit and then need Anise to physically undress and redress her. She wasn’t even capable of pulling a top over her head. She flopped like a fish in the dressing room. However, after repeating the process and selecting some accessories she was capable of inserting her debit card into the machine, keying in her pin and leaving with eight hundred dollars of merchandise when her friends returned for her.
I asked Anise how she felt about selling her so many things when the woman was so impaired. She told me the woman had the appearance of wealth and further she made sure the items the woman bought were returnable should she awake the next day and have buyers’ remorse. Fair deal – I thought.
Hearing about these ladies reminded me of another shopping while intoxicated fiasco. “Selene“was having an adult slumber party with her girlfriends. They had started drinking wine in the afternoon while watching daytime television and later in the day they retired to pajamas, drinking tequila, dreaming and scheming.
About 10:30 pm that night, Selene called me. Would I please order something for her from a website on the internet? She gave me her credit card number. The internet and internet shopping were fairly new at the time and Selene didn’t have a home computer yet. I wasn’t at the party but did have a computer and internet.
What did she want, I asked? I heard peels of laughter in the background. I want a monkey rocker. More laughter. What on earth is a monkey rocker? More hoots and hollers. I looked it up online and found it was a sex aid that had been praised on some “best of” product review on an Oprah program. It was also over seven hundred dollars! I told her there was no way she needed to make that big of a purchase in her condition, but she insisted. Her girlfriends didn’t help the situation either; they were egging her on. I finally acquiesced and told her I had done the deed just to get her off the phone.
The next morning, I let Selene believe, just for a few minutes, that I had placed the order before letting her know to her relief that the purchase was never made. Shopping and tequila? Amazon after midnight? I’ve heard of retail therapy and drowning your sorrows but combining the two is a dangerous sport. What’s your story? Have you any shopping while tipsy lessons?