SHOPPING CRAZES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3139, 16 October 1922, Page 8

SHOPPING CRAZES.

(By a Victim). What is your special craae in shopping? Which are the shops you should be dragged past by force? There are. of course, such obvious attractions as the draper's window to the woman, or the old bookshop for many men. I do not refer to those. 1 mean the little articles that most of us are unable to resist. Let me illustrate. I cannot resist the contents of a stationer's window. I am sure to see there just the writing pad 1 want, tho writing pad that is better than any I have ever possessed, the writing pad of such tempting appearance that if I took it home 1 should start at once to write the book of the year. . . And such a collection of unused writing pads as 1 have at home! Yet 1 am always adding to their number.

As for pencils and fountain pens, I could set up a. little shop of my own with the accumulation on my writing table, but I know that if 1 stop to look in a, stationer's window to-day 1 shall get at least one more. A friend has the same craze for tics. If he but looks in a hosier's window, he sees the one tic in all the world that will make life really complete, and even if he were down to bis last shillings he would have to buy it. Ho will probably never wear it. If he were a man with a. hundred necks, he would still be overstocked. Put buy lie must —it is his craze, his fate, his doom—and he is always grateful to any lady friend who will accept a few dozen unused ties from his collection to make a patchwork quilt. That man's brother buys pipes. Every day in any shop he sees the pipe of his d'reanis. It may cost anything from a shilling to a guinea, but he recognises it as the only pijx 3 that will raise smoking to its proj>er place as the crowning triumph of life. So another pipe goes home. It is never smoked, for he :s true to a couple of dirty old briars that were bought in an absent-minded moment with no idea that they were to have the abiding place in his heart. 1 have the honor of knowing a lady who is sane and reasonable on every ■subject but soap. Soap should be, but one of the ingredients of life ; she makes it the whole menu. Soap in a shop window loosens her purse strings at once. She must huv.

It may be/expensive toilet soap, delicately perfumed, nestling in velvetlined caskets, or a bargain in long bars of homely yellow offered at a sacrifice if you take a hundredweight. Never a walk past the shops but she takes home soap, in one or another of its countless varieties and shapes. One of these days she may find a soap that she'likes beyond all others, and life will never lie quite the same again, but at present her days are given to the quest of an ideal, and that quest keeps her young. And it is all very well for you to laugh, bul what is your special craze in the shops?