Day 62: Online Christmas Shopping

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Day 62: Online Christmas Shopping

For the first time ever, I did all my Christmas shopping online. Other years I went to the mall and dragged myself from one end to another looking for gifts for my son. Usually, I know what he needs or can guess what he wants, so it’s merely a question of finding these things.

This year, however, things were different. With a pinched sciatica nerve, I couldn’t go to the mall. My back is a lot better than what it was almost four weeks ago, but I still can only stay on my feet for five or ten minutes at a time. So, I had to do my Christmas shopping online.

The trouble with online shopping though is that you have to know what you want. In a mall, you can walk around and look at various things, but online it’s more complicated. So, I started by opening Amazon where I typed in the search bar ‘gifts for men’. The result of my search was of no use to me. So I tried a more direct approach ... I asked my son to give me a list of things he would like.

While that made shopping a lot easier, now I was faced with another problem ... the shipping costs. For instance, I looked at an item that cost $20 but the shipping and handling costs were $23. Another item was priced $54 and the shipping and handling costs were $40.

Then I noticed that Amazon offered a service called Prime, with which feature shipping and handling would be free. Not every item was included in this free shipping list, but millions were. They offered a free 31 days trial, so I took them up on it.

Now that I was an Amazon Prime member I repeated my search for my son’s gifts. Gift #1 ... free shipping, gift #2 ... free shipping, gift #3 ... free shipping, I was suddenly in shopping heaven and found everything he wanted without having to pay one cent on shipping costs.

Now the question was, would the gifts arrive on time? Some were estimated to arrive this week, some next week, some in the third week of December. Well, that was cutting it a bit close but what the heck, if something arrived a little late, so what.

So that’s it, all my shopping is done. I’ve never been a big fan of shopping online, but I’ve changed my tune now. No more braving the cold. No more trudging through snow and slipping on patches of ice. No more crisscrossing the mall and putting up with loads of shoppers, standing in line to pay and then laden with heavy packages dragging myself home. This year I installed myself in an armchair, put my feet up and clicked my way through Amazon.

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