This is it, guys. Get ready for war. All over the island, sale-aholics are dusting off their credit cards, re-arranging their wallets, scruitinising maps and charting their courses.
At any other time of the year, these are nice, meek, perfectly ordinary and reasonable people.
But July is no ordinary month. It is the month of the upcoming Great Singapore Sale.
In the next week or so, they will transform into lean, mean and fighting machines: able to comb 10 stores in a single sweep; whip out their credit cards faster than Clint Eastwood can say "make my day"; spot a bargain 200 m away; and elbow their way through walls of weaklings who are mere amateur shoppers.
These complicated manoeuvres may not mean much to ordinary mortals, but for people who live for amassing possessions while getting a good bargain, it's Showtime.
Not that anyone here needs an excuse to indulge in the national obsession, but the prospect of getting a bargain makes it easier to justify to disapproving parents/wives/husbands how we ended up hauling home tank-loads of clothes, CDs, and home furnishings.
So why do we shop all the time? "It's Singaporeans' only form of exercise," said my lean and toned sister. Carolyn, who complains incessantly that most Singapore men are flabby and have no muscle definition.
"There's nothing else to do," said a financial analyst friend who uprooted to Los Angeles where she could sail in summer, ski in the winter, and shop even more in between.
"It's something in the water," said an acquaintance -- an X-files/ JFK fan. "It's a conspiracy between retailers and the CIA."
So I asked an expert -- a teenager who used to wear flipped-back baseball caps and tucked out shirts, when he was into runge. Now he and his friends wear Versus and Emporio Armani -- neither of which I can afford.
His theory is young people, searching for an identity, constantly reinvent themselves, and, depending on whom they identify with at the time, shopping is just an excuse for a costume change.
And maybe it doesn't stop with teenagers. Maybe, as adults, we shop to own things that makes us seem less like cookie cutter moulds of one another. Our possessions are us: how else would that mild- mannered accountant in the next office, who has 10 different pairs of Tag Heuers, tell people around him that he is really not meek and boring: that he is actually an avid diver.
That guy in that all-black outfit, funky tie and wire-rimmed glasses? Inside that aggressive accounts executive exterior lurks an intellectual, intense, sensitive ... and wannabe artsy guy.
An older, and maybe wiser, colleague has a catchy term for it -- competitive consumerism. It's a kind of designer one-upmanship. People's homes, cars and bodies are giant display cases for the things they own: fancy kitchen gadgets from Europe, expensive stereo systems and even Swatches. We become walking price-tags.
In a place where appearance counts, we shop, and therefore we are.
And, of course, being Singaporean, there are those who just want a good deal -- like my sister, who confesses to getting palpitations when she sees red-and-white signs that say "sale".
"I get tunnel vision," she said, starting to gasp just talking about it.
She has it down to a science. Last week, she went on a pre-great- sale reconnaissance mission, lugging home two carrier bags from Episode and Jessica. When I told her to consider hiding the stash before our parents found it, she replied indignantly that she got them at 50 to 70 per cent discounts.
If there were a caste system for shoppers, she would head the warrior caste.
"I zero in on sales with more accuracy than a kamikaze pilot. First, I recce several places to see if I can pick up anything along the way. Then, I go through them with more detail, to see where I can find what I want -- right price, right material," she explained. Then, she brings it home. "And my closet feels happy again."
Next year, she is going to Australia in the summer. Forget the sun, sea, surf or even surfer-dudes. She is going there to shop.
All this is too troublesome and complicated for me. And I really ought to try to wean myself off shopping. I mean, do I really need another black skirt -- even if it's DKNY at a 50 per cent discount? Or another Swatch? Or another polo dress? Well, actually, I do.
But I'm broke and it's at least half a year till bonus time. So sale or no sale, I think I will just stay at home and sit it out, maybe rent a few videos, read the books I've been meaning to finish, bake an apple pie and clean my room.
But first, a quick visit to Ngee Ann City.