THE SWAMP ANGEL. Prentice Mulford Mulford

Before building, I bought many carpenters’ tools wherewith to build. I bought tools during the entire period of building. I bought many more than were necessary. Any bungler of a carpenter could have put up my shanty with a saw, hammer, and the necessary nails. But saws and planes and chisels and augers, with new handles and bright, glittering edges, became fascinations for me. I became involved and drawn into this peculiar vortex of tool buying, and could scarcely pass a hardware shop, without thinking I wanted some of the wares I saw in the window. I did want them. But I didn’t need many of them, save, possibly, the need of the pleasure they gave me in the buying, and afterwards in contemplating them. There is a great charm in buying new things, whether you need them or not. A passion for buying can so suddenly break out, and empty your purse much faster than you can fill it. I can well understand and sympathize with ladies who go out shopping, and return home dripping with ten times more bundles than they intended. There is a mysterious and dangerous influence in stores, tempting you to buy things, that you find, on getting home, you don’t want. I found, after a time, that the only successful method of resisting this was to brace up, and resolve firmly to buy only the article I had previously determined to buy. Armed with this, I could get in a store and out again without being loaded down with gimcracks.

      Much that I bought needlessly I did while under the influence of those small commercial magicians, the clerks, who make you feel, through and through, on going into their stores, that you must buy something, whether you wish to or not; and that to look five-minutes at their wares, without buying, is robbing them of valuable time. You must go with all your wits and full pressure of decision about you, in order to resist successfully the silent power of these men. The whole atmosphere of some stores is surcharged with a buy-compelling element. You are in its bonds and fetters immediately on going in. From the boss down, all are determined that no customer passes out without buying something. That thought of determination is literally in the air; and if you are tired and hungry, and, above all, hurried, or undecided, your mind will be captured by these mercantile magicians. They will put their thought in you. You will think it and not your own. Their minds are centred on a purpose—to sell. Hence they are strong in that direction. Your mind is not centred on anything. Hence you are weak. So you buy what they make you buy, when you think you are buying it yourself. You’re not. They’re selling it to you. Small blame to them. It’s their business to sell. It’s your business, and my business, when we become buyers, to go to the seller with something of a clear idea of what we want, first; secondly, not to go in a fluster; thirdly, not to have our mind in that store half an hour before our body gets there, as we must have when suffering that general complaint, hurry; and then we may find, on getting home, that we’ve bought the thing we wanted, and not the thing the dry-goods magician forced us to buy, and which, on getting the use of our own wits, we find we neither like, want, or need. I don’t blame salesmen for so working their spells on purchasers. It’s a matter with them of self-protection, after all; for if they sympathized with us, and thereby got into our flabby, aimless, undecided frame of mind, we then should be working and controlling their minds and acts, bringing them temporarily into a state of semi-idiocy, during which they might sell out the whole store to us at half price. It is a wonder to me that salesmen and saleswomen can keep from going more or less insane, when you consider the shoals of cross-grained, undecided, aimless, and run-down-in-mind-and-body people, they have daily to meet and deal with. Because, if you live all the time in an insane asylum, your own head is apt to tumble more or less off its base; and some of our big stores, when filled with hurried skurried customers, especially during the holidays, do suggest the approaches to an insane asylum. Were I a salesman, I would sell my father and mother and all the lot, down to the third and fourth generations, a brass watch for one of gold, and that with a clear conscience, providing they came to buy of me in that wicked and iniquitous frame of mind born of hurry, indecision, and the desire of getting something for nothing. Carrying such a head about and inflicting it on people is an outrage and a public injury; and I have carried such a head, and did this sin and outrage many and many a time myself.