Shopping For The Queasy Consumer

[March 26th, 2008] We are a busy people, we Portland inhabitants. We have multiple careers in addition to day jobs. We have grand projects and pet causes that keep us up at night. We read. We have a famed drinking subculture to maintain, and that live music ain’t gonna listen to itself. We are studies in how best to waste the odd free hour with panache.

And most of us are a little hesitant to admit our participation in that insidious evil of modern life—retail. Whether it’s an all-out aversion to capitalism or simply disgust at trying to find parking at Lloyd Center, dread of shopping is a pretty strong Portland value. Or so we claim.

But Portland has a rich commercial landscape, dotted with stores that appear locked in a Starbucks-vs.-Stumptown dialogue: Big-boxes abut flourishing, independently owned storefronts. Our Portland-only shops exhibit the best in shoe artistry, T-shirt innovation and even sustainability (flip through these pages and skim for key words like “altered” and “reformatted”). Getting into some new threads can be more akin to a Friday-night bar hop than a chore.

And in a state that has no sales tax, it is perhaps sacrilegious to eschew shopping altogether.

So in this guide we’re giving you our take on some of the most worthwhile shopping meccas in town. Notable by their absence from these pages are two categories: bookstores/comic shops and bike shops. These areas were far too vast for a modest pocket-sized guide to the good and glorious in local retailers, so we held off on those listings for our upcoming Finder guide. To belabor the retail image, this is the sample we’re handing out in a paper cup at the front of the store—this is, after all, the shopping section of our city guide—and we’re hoping you’ll get a taste for a much more generous helping when Finder 2008 hits the streets in June. Savor it.

—Saundra Sorenson, editor

WE MADE THIS!

PUBLISHER — Shawna McKeown

EDITOR — Saundra Sorenson

CONTRIBUTORS — Elianna Bar-El, Byron Beck, Tiffany Lee Brown, Kelly Clarke, Laura Shinn Farthing, Jeremy Gillick, Lillian Hogan, Casey Jarman, Lance Kramer, Shefali Kulkarni, Michael Mannheimer, John Minervini, Carin Moonin, Deeda Schroeder, Ethan Smith, Ben Waterhouse

COPY EDITORS — Kat Hyatt, Leigh van der Werff, Matt Buckingham

ART DIRECTOR — Cari Vander Yacht

DESIGNERS — Erik Blad, Brian Brown

PHOTOGRAPHY — Jenna Biggs, Matt Wong, Cari Vander Yacht

WEB EDITOR — Ian Gillingham

WEB DESIGNERS — Rob Adams, Daniel Toman