I hate shopping

I hate shopping. I hate shopping in person, in brick and mortar outlets. I hate shopping online. My experience is that somehow every single curation of a shopping experience is designed for someone other than me.

Or at least, that was true until recently.

One of the uses to which I’ve put AI in recent days is to do some of the hard work that I hate doing in shopping. I’ve done this in two different directions with two different sets of products — or really with a lot more than that, but two that I’m going to talk about.

For me, there’s the challenge of shopping for scotch. I pretty much know what I like, although I’m always eager to discover new things. And what I like tends to come in and out of stock, at widely varying prices at the various liquor stores I frequent. I tend to buy it a case at a time. So whenever it’s time for me to buy scotch, I sit down and I spend half an hour looking at all the different stores to see whether they have what I want, and if so, at what price.

I have used Claude Code in the last few days to put together a site which, for a variety of reasons, I won’t share with you directly — but I will share with you gesturally, so you can get a sense of how it works for me.

In an opposite direction, where the challenge isn’t to find where I can buy what I know I want, but rather to ascertain what I want: I’m often overwhelmed by the combination of the wide variety of shops selling things and the small selections at each of them. I have a desire to aggregate all of this — to give myself the choice of lots and lots of products across lots and lots of shops, and to sort by keywords, or price, or item type.

I’ve done this with shoes. I’ve done this with coats. And in recent days, for fun, I’ve been doing it with both lingerie and sex toys.

It’s a great effect, I might add.

Featured image prompt (gemini): Cinematic photograph, medium shot, warm amber retail light bleeding into deep shadow. A cluttered but intimate liquor store aisle at night, shot from a low angle looking up along a shelf of amber bottles — single malts ranked in backlit rows, labels illegible, each bottle catching the light differently. No person in the frame. A half-open cardboard case on the floor, a few bottles already nested in paper, one pulled out and resting on the shelf edge as if just compared. The mood is late-night, deliberate, slightly obsessive: someone has been here a while, working something out. Colors deep gold and near-black, lens flare from the bottom shelf light, slightly wide angle, depth of field shallow enough that the far end of the aisle dissolves.

Bottom image prompt (openai): Large-format still-life photograph, studio strobe with one hard side-light casting a long cold shadow left: a crystal lowball glass holding two fingers of amber scotch sits centre-frame on a dark slate surface, and beside it, slightly overlapping, a woman’s silk slip — deep champagne, pooled rather than folded, as though just stepped out of. The slip is the wrong thing in this picture; the scotch glass belongs to an office, the lingerie belongs to a bedroom, and the two together belong to nowhere respectable. Colours are saturated, almost lacquered — the whisky lit from within, the silk catching the strobe’s edge in a thin gold line.