Shopaholics? (sixth meeting)

After a busy few weeks, Monique and I finally met another time. I hadn’t heard from Monique for a while and it turns out she had left her phone with her cousin who has been out of town for the past few weeks, and that she hadn’t been checking her email as frequently as she should have been. She kept apologizing even after I told her that it was fine. After all the apologizing, she asked me about my Thanksgiving break. I told her about my spontaneous decision to take a trip down to Houston with my friends and how I got to see some of my family there.

She then noticed the new boots that I was wearing. I told her that I got them on Black Friday. I told her it was my first Black Friday experience. She's never had the experience but she knew what it was so I just continued to tell her about the deals that the different stores had. She told me that Brazil attempted to do something like Black Friday but she believed that it would never work because clothes are really expensive in Brazil so even when they’re on sale, they’re still really expensive. For example, she said a pair of jeans could cost up to $500. I couldn’t imagine paying that much just for a pair of jeans. I told her it was similar in Vietnam, that all the American brands and European brands are overpriced, which is quite ironic considering many of the clothes are “Made in Vietnam.” We examined how international brands, however, still did well in our respective countries.

We then started talking about our shopping habits, for example about what we like to buy, where we shop and the different brands we liked. We talked about the different malls in the area. Since she lived in Dallas, she recommended places where I could find good shopping in Dallas and in turn, I told her what malls were around here. It was interesting to see that we liked the same brands such as Zara. H&M and Forever 21. We talked about how much we enjoyed Forever 21 because it’s affordable even though the clothes aren’t the best quality. However, we established that it’s a good strategy on Forever 21's part, because trends go out of style and once they do, us girls have the mentality to go shopping again anyways. This is why I was intrigued, however, because we were attracted to the same brands and followed the same trends despite our upbringing on opposite sides of the world. As I said earlier, international brands had a presence in the countries we grew up in and I realized that this is probably why we had similar tastes, as the same transnational brands influenced us. It brought to mind the idea homogenization of global cultures due to globalization. Even if it might just be fashion taste, the expansion of these transnational brands had impacted our perceptions. We enjoyed talking about shopping but even then, she asked me about the coming weeks as the semester ends.

We talked a lot about finals and she was surprised about the number of finals I had. We were both ready for the holidays but we both agreed that we just needed to work hard in these next few weeks to have a much deserved holiday.