Chase A. Wolf's

Global Shopping Adventures

             Hong Kong, Beijing, New Delhi, Caracas, Istanbul – in a world growing smaller every day, these are still exotic-sounding names and places to most Americans.

             A hundred years ago, the great world traveler Burton Holmes transported the exotic lands and far away places of his adventures to America with his words, photographs and later, motion pictures.  He brought to America the sights, the sounds and the smells of the World.

             Today, where adventurers once traveled slowly by steamship, horseback or camel to visit those distant places and return with their curious goods, our “modern” modes of transport have reduced those epic voyages of years and months to mere weeks, days and even hours.  America imports its goods from Asia, India, Europe, Central and South America by great cargo ships and jet airplanes and the goods of once exotic and strange provenance are now commonplace and can be found in American retail outlets and shopping centers everywhere.  But somewhere along the way, as we built our global instant gratification economy, we lost something; we lost the curiosity, the anticipation of newness – we lost the excitement of shopping that those goods once gave us.

             Americans, like most people, love to shop.  They love bargains.  Sometimes they go to buy – sometimes they just go to look.  But something has happened to shopping in America in the last few decades – something contrary to America’s curiosity of the unknown, its love of adventure.  Shopping has become – the same.  In every city in every state, we see the same chain retail stores, the same chain grocery stores, the same chain restaurants – the same everything.  Though the goods sold were often made in faraway lands, somehow the excitement and adventure of their origins have been lost and we get instead – sameness.  We have commoditized the World.

             In our age of instant global communication, the world is indeed shrinking – but it will always be both too vast and too regional to ever be the same.  It is a rich and diverse world, with many spoken languages and many customs that may seem exotic to Americans – much in the way we seem different to them – but we are all people.  And people everywhere love to shop, they love to buy and they love to sell.  The people of those distant lands are proud of their cultures and both eager and honored to share them with us – the Americans.  Trade is a universal language and one that brings us all together.

             I’m Chase A. Wolf and for most of my adult life I’ve been involved in the retail industry.  And I’m an avid world traveler.  Traveling transports us all out of ordinary to the extraordinary.  The sights, the sounds, the smells of far away places weave a tapestry over our senses.  The newness, the strangeness and the excitement of travel is as important to me as the air I breathe in those distant lands.  My goal, my mission – is to bring back to you, the American shopper, the excitement of our great world in the hopes that you too, will be transported to far away places – far away from sameness – to breathe that distant air.

             I will bring you not just the glamorous trinkets, the oddities and curiosities of distant lands to delight your senses, but also the practical everyday goods and tools used by our faraway brothers and sisters who share this world with us.  You will be transported.

             Let’s say No More to sameness!  With Global Shopping Adventures I’ll bring the excitement back to shopping.  I will bring you the World.

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