I do not like shopping. Department stores quite literally tire me. I find trips to supermarkets, though necessary, tedious. And I have caused many a family disagreement with my inability to enjoy the practice of walking city centers and comparing similar items of ultimately the same thing. Buying souvenirs has always been my least favorite part of traveling, and I have often been embarrassed by the fact that my gifts to others are more modest than theirs for me. Neither has online shopping made purchasing commodities any more enjoyable for me, thoughts about what happens behind the scene (or behind the screen) prevent this, though they have not prevented me from joining the global ranks of online shoppers. Email requests to provide customer feedback on items just bought annoy me more than I can say: why does an economic transaction no longer suffice, why does this now get symbolically protracted into pseudo-reflexive “satisfaction-ratings,” I regularly ask myself. (I know why, of course, to help sellers’ self-advertising via their social media channels and, perhaps, to help potential future customers make their decisions. The problem is that I do not find those answers convincing, so I just routinely ignore the emailed feedback requests.)

These confessions of an arguably “flawed consumer” (Bauman 2005), or perhaps merely an overthinking one, still leave room for occasional surprises. Months ago, in a furniture shop I had no interest in visiting myself, I spotted an object that caught my attention and imagination: an incredible work of craftsmanship, sturdy yet elegant, a nostalgic invocation of premodern rurality that would, even I was immediately convinced, enhance its future owner's quality of life and aesthetically enrich any twenty-first century living room. The object in question was a sofa, one we did not need and did not buy. Yet, I found myself doing two things I would usually be extremely reluctant and unlikely to do: I asked the shop owner about the sofa's history, its materials and production; and I even took a picture of this particular piece of furniture. What was so beguiling to me was more than the object's apparent beauty. More fascinating was a deep contrast between its appearance and its history: the sofa oozed authenticity and local belonging. Made of Harris tweed and leather, it materially and semiotically referenced the Outer Hebrides.