Shopping and Its Discontents

by Jídé Salawu

In 2011, a Black woman in Toronto named Mary McCarthy was asked to open her backpack by a clerk at a Shoppers Drug Mart. She came to realize after a time that she was under suspicion of pilfering, even though she had only come to shop; in 2015 the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered the company to pay her $8,000 in restitution for the racial profiling.

Though it’s many years later, I too have sometimes been rushed, surveilled and supervised at Shoppers Drug Mart,  even though I know exactly the aisle where I will find the Aveeno cream I want. Not every time, but at random, some attendant will follow, exaggeratedly describing the prices and locations of various things for me as if I couldn’t read the prices written on the shelves for myself.

When I lived in Manchester, there was a spectrum of shops including MAC, where my partner got her makeup kits. At New Look she bought jeans and a pair of slippers. And later, we wound up in an exotic shop that sold Timberland goods. I was wearing everyday trousers and a simple Primark t-shirt. When the receptionist walked up to me to ask whether I knew what I was looking for, I felt jarred in some way. But no hard feelings. My partner bought me my first pair of Timberland boots, a birthday gift in arrears. But the discouraging sense that a shop clerk might treat one badly—the fear of being thought one of “those people” who came into a nice shop to rub their hands all over things they could never afford to buy—stayed with me.

A friend in Edmonton told me about his visit to a cafe on Whyte Ave. He’d been looking for a good cafe where he might work on his dissertation. The cafe attendant told him that they didn’t serve students in the cafe. Dumbstruck, he asked her to provide solid reasons for this policy until it came to the notice of the manager. The manager came around and asked her to take my friend's order. But he never returned there again.