Shopping for Xmas Gifts

There are such great places to shop in Melbourne in the city and on High Streets, that I have been able to avoid frequenting malls for the three years I've been here.

With my holidays and Christmas tasks officially starting this week, I needed to buy a very specific gift  for Andrew at a very specific store. There's only two of them in Australia, one is in Sydney, and the other is newly arrived here in Melbourne: The Gap.

For my purchases, I missioned all the way out to Chadstone, a massive shopping mall in the South Eastern suburbs, otherwise known as "The Shopping Capital", and the "Paris of the South". (Look, it's big, but it's not any West Edmonton Mall.)

I found the Gap in the Luxury section of the mall, down from Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo.

Look, if I really miss North American vanity sizing, I might mission down to "Chaddy" and blithely  purchase a size 0 or 2 again for a bit of an ego boost.  However, if it's a good deal I'm after, (and I love a good deal!)... forget about it! Melbourne will never see any of those great end-of-season sales you can expect at the Gap back in Canada. The average price for anything here was about $79....pre-Christmas sale price. Retailers in Australia may be desperate to get people in the doors as they compete against on-line shopping this year, but apparently the retailers in the Luxury section of Chadstone have a different clientele and a different interpretation of the term "price-reduction."

The salesperson who assisted me was delighted to discover I was Canadian, (like most Aussies, he had spent a ski season in Banff), and then shocked that I could live in Melbourne for three years, and only just now make my first visit to "Chaddy".

 It's true,  I'm now no longer a "Chadstone virgin", but I'm just left feeling a little underwhelmed.