the essential
In Toulouse, the crowded streets become the scene of stifling excitement where pedestrians and public transport dominate, relegating the car to second place. Between endless queues and crushes in the stores, the crowds are always full as Christmas approaches.
Place Wilson in Toulouse has never been such a hell for cars in traffic. Further on, rue d'Alsace-Lorraine, the countless umbrellas create a moving wave of fabric, undulating with the wind and the crowd. The Zara store, the all-powerful temple of the most ardent consumerism as the holidays approach, brings together more and more faithful.
It's 5 p.m. this Saturday, December 21, and the ready-to-wear franchise of Spanish origin is breaking attendance records. Just to try on a piece of clothing in this boutique reserved for women's clothing, you have to wait a good half hour. It's even worse at the checkouts. Elaborate strategies are organized to optimize the time spent in this den of consumption. The “accompanists”, often men, are transformed into human portmanteaus. Stoic, they wait in endless lines while their companions continue their shopping.
“Man, coat rack”
This is the case for Philippe. This 52-year-old aeronautical engineer with large, clear eyes holds a sparkling evening dress in one hand, three sweaters and a few skirts in the other. “My wife continues shopping while I wait in line. I've been here for about an hour,” he says with the smile of a soldier who has fulfilled his mission well. The couple came from Rouffiac-Tolosan, to the north-east of the city. Surprisingly, reaching the heart of Toulouse posed no difficulty. “It may be due to the time we left, but the traffic was fluid even on the ring road,” assures the Airbus employee.
Back to reality…
Florence preferred not to tempt the devil. Like many of the customers of the city center shops, she favored public transport and, more certainly, the metro to carry out these last Christmas purchases. “I live in the Rangueil district. On a daily basis, the traffic is already hell. So at the moment, during these periods of rush in the stores, it is unthinkable for me to come here by car”, slips – she said, both arms weighted down by bags filled with gifts for her family. With her loved ones, she plunges again into the compact crowd of rue Alsace-Lorraine.
The flow suddenly stops in front of the Sabon store, a subsidiary of the Yves Rocher group, founded in 1997 in Israel. Activists with hygiaphones shout that we must boycott the franchise under the gaze of teenagers and children who do not fully understand ce that's happening. Quickly, a police car intervenes, but the activists have already taken flight. The ballet of customers resumes in the stores, as if nothing had happened. As if everyone needed to breathe after a particularly anxious year.
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