Shopping in SoHo
Thought this was a funny image, for its illustration of how it feels to shop in SoHo, NYC on a sunny Saturday. (I am simply savoring the letter “s” today!)
Yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny day here in NYC, albeit cold, and I wanted to take advantage of it. My sister and I decided to take a walk down to SoHo, because she was looking for something in particular, and I was looking for a nice long stroll in the sunshine. (Again with those esses!)
As a New Yorker, you generally know the places in Manhattan to avoid. Times Square at any time of year at any time of day is number one. Herald Square or Rockefeller Center around the holidays. And, generally, SoHo on a sunny Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
New Yorkers are busy. During the week, it’s hard to find time to get things done, run those errands, hunt for that perfect winter-to-spring shirt you’ve been meaning to buy. So on the weekends, unlike the other best-avoided locations that are made such by tourists, SoHo becomes flooded with locals and tourists, alike, hunting for end-of-season sales or checking out the latest streetwear pop-ups.
Don’t get me wrong—I love SoHo for its collection of every store you’d ever want in a several block radius. It’s a convenient one-stop-shop for all your material needs. The only issue is, I am not alone in this realization.
The crowds in SoHo on a sunny weekend afternoon are outrageous. Not only on the street, but also once you enter any popular store. (Aritzia? Forget about it.) I would have been totally fine walking down there, turning around, and walking back, without entering a single store. Instead, when we left Pacsun, the line for the register snaked back to the front door.
Why does shopping make us so worn out? When I was younger, I always knew that a day at the mall back-to-school shopping would leave me wiped. Perhaps it’s all the mental energy needed to peruse each item on each rack and then imagine what it would look like on you and determine whether what you’re imagining is flattering or not. Then there are the conversations you have with yourself about taking risks with your style, about body positivity, about looking at all the other people shopping and what they’re picking up and wearing and how they look better in it than you do.
In America, we place material objects above so much else, so it’s easy to feel a steady pressure when you’re out deciding which of these hundreds of thousands of material objects you want to make your own. There are the thought processes behind whether you can afford such material objects (in NYC, probably not, but ya girl’s gotta dress herself), about whether you are buying something you need versus something you want, about how much use you’ll actually get out of something.
And then you place all these internal dialogues smack dab in the middle of SoHo on a sunny Saturday, and none of them even take priority. What takes priority is making sure you don’t lose your shopping partner in the sea of bodies. In fact, yesterday my sister and I watched a woman so overtaken by the crowds that she tripped down off a curb and fell onto her hip in the middle of the street. I and several other people ran out there to help her up, and I walked her across the street to where she had been intending to go when she took a tumble. Shopping should not be a perilous endeavor, but in SoHo, anything is possible.
After we shopped for a couple hours, we decided to reward ourselves with a visit to a bakery, where we were once again greeted by a line to the door, winding past the cupcakes, and a mad dash to grab a table. But the cupcakes were delicious, so was it all worth it?
The adventure of shopping in SoHo is always worth it—I merely complain, because complaining is a favorite pastime of mine. I exited the venture with a bathing suit, a baseball cap, and a headache—and 2/3 ain’t bad.