Please come back, David Jones. I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me

Detailed summary

I see now the error of my bargain-seeking ways and promise to do all my Christmas shopping with DJs, if I can find a store that’s still open.

You've used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.

For sale: One lovingly cross-stitched tapestry bearing the cautionary Latin maxim, “caveat emptor”. Now stained by the rueful tears of its creator.

Spoiler: This item doesn’t actually exist, which is probably for the best. I’m diabolical at handcrafts and far too impatient for all the scrubbing required to get makeup stains out of basically anything.

The subject of items destined for the bargain bin – or not – brings us inevitably to yesterday’s huge news that retail behemoth David Jones was closing half its stores with thousands of jobs potentially lost. There was a time when such news would’ve driven me, weeping, to the front of its flagship city store, clutching candles and clad in a black mantilla, praying fervently for a saviour for my truest shopping love.

Alas though, no amount of mental gymnastics can alter the fact that I have lately been an unfaithful spouse. I started cheating on David Jones three months ago, when Lithuanian online marketplace Vinted opened its virtual doors in Australia. Then I remembered that I didn’t mind an occasional browse on its secondhand fashion trading predecessor, Depop, and the rest is history. Including, possibly, David Jones.

But mea culpa, caveat emptor, tam stultis fui. (The last one means “I was so stupid”. I was on a roll with the Latin, and it seemed rude to interrupt myself.)

Back to Depop and Vinted. From herein I will refer to the two online traders as “Dented”, partly because it’s a handy portmanteau, partly because that is the condition of some of the stuff I have accidentally purchased after not reading the original sales listings properly, and partly because I have bought so many things in recent times that I’ve lost track of what I sourced from where.

And if you are reading this and you happen to be my husband, I would like it noted that some little AI gremlin must’ve crept in and written the previous paragraph because…

There…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Brisbane Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.