We already know this rule: You aren’t permitted to leave a museum without running into a gift shop. I also discovered late last week in Paris that you can’t walk out of the newly restored Notre-Dame cathedral without passing a large gift zone near the arrow that points to Sortie de secours. And you can’t even leave a country, really, without exiting passport control on the way to the gate and passing — not by, but through — a duty-free shopping zone through which snakes a zig-zaggy path to your gate. Before you leave anywhere, in other words, there’s a gentle shakedown, with shiny objects (museum jewelry, clickety-clacky rosaries, bottles of perfume, you get the idea) distracting you on the way to the exit.
Call it the Grocery Store Principle: Make them walk through the cookies and the candy on the way to the stuff you really came for, which is always in the back. You’ve had a nice visit to one of the oldest and most important cathedrals in the world, but before you go, “Can we interest you in a scented candle? A wooden icon? A pair of earrings?“It didn’t used to be like this. Duty-free, for instance, used to be just a store. It had a defined space, one of the alcoves in the airport terminal, along with the one with the newspapers and the one with the weird toilet seat-shaped pillows and the one with the Cinnabons, and you could pass right by all of them on your way to the gate, or the Panda Express. You had a choice, in other words.
