Much ado about SALE!

It’s Saturday. And all the roads lead, not to the beach, but to the mall where a 3-days SALE with some prices slashed to as low as 50% was hyped.

There was a traffic jam as people from all walks of life jammed the entrances before the mall opened at 10:00 am. So, who says that life is hard, that we need to tighten our belts, that the economic crunch is worldwide? Not in my part of the planet. Life is only hard in the newspapers. In HongKong, everyday is a SALE day for all the stores. In the Philippines, it is not frequent that a mall announces a sale. Therefore, Filipinos rush in where there is a mall-wide sale.

I didn’t know that there was a sale in the mall. I dropped my wife and kids at the mall at 2:30 pm as they planned to just do some window shopping. But seeing the SALE posters and the rush of shoppers, we had to change plans and adjust the budget.

They said they were going to call me at 5:00 pm as we were still going to attend the 5:30 pm mass. But they called at 6:30 pm as they could not decide what to buy amidst the so many things they wanted to splurge on.

When I went to the mall to meet them, I had a hard time looking for a parking space. When finally I entered the mall, I saw all the boutiques bursting with SALE items. The wide corridors were not spared as SALE items fought for space with the wily shoppers. The mall looked like a big ukay-ukay store. It was a sudden change of ambiance seeing so many people eager to buy things they ignored before. And they were egged to buy more by the festive air and the Christmas carols. There may be no Christmas decors yet on display, but the Christmas songs just bring ‘joy to the world’ even if the news said that health workers in the US were already protesting for possible job losses.

I saw many familiar faces – friends who could easily swing to Hongkong or Bangkok to buy clothes were busy flipping on clothes with 20% mark-off, and some at PhP 99.00 only; street kids in basketball shorts and slippers tried on discounted denims; couples with four… ah five… no it’s six children… who obviously belonged to what the government categorized as below poverty level, were also doing the shopping, or window shopping, and had a whiff of Jollibee, or Dunkin Donuts, or Chowking. With a sale as big as this, and shoppers as many as this, the really poor who can only afford to dream, and even the taong grasa who have no dreams, can enjoy their time in the airconditioned mall without buying anything as they can easily be lost amidst a sea of nondescript crowd.

We left the mall at closing time. Just like so many others. The Christmas carols were still blaring. The entrances were now closed and shoppers carried their heavy bags of newly bought items with strains of ‘Joy to the World’. Many were laughing as they literally shopped till they dropped.

It was a dark night and was about to rain. Tomorrow is Sunday. I hope that none of the shoppers will wake up to reality - that they still have food to buy, next week’s allowances to spare, rent, bills, tuition fees to pay, etc., etc. – and end up cursing that they shouldn’t have bought the items they paid for at a bargain, and laughed at last night.

The mall owners are still laughing.@