Delayed Gratification: Why Waiting is the Key to Modern Satisfaction

The Golden Age of Anticipation: Why We Loved the Slow Build-Up

The holidays are coming. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner. As a child, the excitement in the lead-up to the holidays was palpable, marked by annual pastimes like watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on KOLD Channel 13. The buzz around these events was amplified by little things, like this ad that appeared in the Television Log section of the Tucson Citizen newspaper on Tuesday, December 9, 1980, promoting KOLD’s airing of the A Charlie Brown Christmas special at 7 P.M. that evening: “As the yuletide season approaches, Charlie Brown and Linus search beyond the aluminum trees, the tinsel and gaudy neon to find the real, unornamented meaning of Christmas.”

In my family, these holiday specials contributed to the slow buildup of anticipation for the big day when we gathered at Nana’s house on Christmas Eve to eat tamales, buñuelos, and open a few presents before heading home for the main event—Santa’s visit later that night.

The Year-Long Wait for Levy’s Grand Opening

That steady build-up of excitement—watching holiday specials to get excited for Christmas—wasn’t just reserved for the holidays; it was a fundamental part of life in the analog age. Longer wait times were an intrinsic, built-in feature of 20th-century life. This is evident in a highly anticipated event in Tucson history—the birth of El Con Mall, marked by the grand opening of its first department store, Levy’s, on November 16, 1960. In 1959, Levy’s, which opened its first downtown Tucson store in 1931, announced that it had signed a lease to join the soon-to-be-built El Con Shopping Center. Developers broke ground on the new shopping center on November 12, 1959. One year later, Levy’s team was making the final preparations for the store’s grand opening.

The Slow crawl: When all you could do was wait

Imagine the excitement in the Tucson community as construction on the new Levy’s building neared completion. Again, it was the little things, like this K-TAN 580 radio advertisement on October 31, 1960, that built anticipation for the event: “LEVY’S activity at the new EL CON LEVY’S forecasts an exciting grand opening scheduled for Nov. 16 … Keep tuned for more news.” At that point, only a handful of people knew what the inside of the modern-looking department store looked like. For the general public, the building exterior was all they had to gauge progress, but that alone was enough to build anticipation.

On November 15, one day before Levy’s grand opening, crews rushed to put the finishing touches on the store. An entire Levy’s El Con Section appeared in the Tucson Citizen Newspaper. “A store is born,” the paper announced. “The curtain will be raised on Nov. 16 at 10 a.m., on Levy’s dazzling new store in the El Con Shopping Center, east of El Conquistador Hotel.”¹Here’s how the newspaper described the sleek new Levy’s building at El Con:

“The two-story building, which occupies the north end of the shopping center, is of variagated gold brick and decorative weather-resistant cement block. The exterior design is tempered modern, the cement block upper portion of the building extending to form a three-foot overhang around the store. The overhang, supported by iron columns is neon-lighted day and night and will be based all around with luxuriant plantings. Block in the upper portion was layed individually in a three-dimensional checkerboard design which utilizes the dramatic play of light and shadow.”²

You can envision families driving down Broadway in the fall of 1960, gazing out the car window to see this beautiful, modern, golden-hued building. Observing the construction progress was likely fascinating, but for the vast majority, details about the new shopping center were difficult, if not impossible, to come by. To find out what was going on behind the scenes, people had to wait until the shopping center opened.

The Trade-Off: Instant Access vs. Delayed Gratification

This vignette from El Con’s history demonstrates how life has changed since the 1960s. We live in a world where instant access to information is the norm. People aren’t accustomed to waiting for information. When I was a kid in the late 1970s, access to information was just as limited as it was in 1960. If something wasn’t covered on local TV news channels, cable, newspapers, or the radio, you were out of luck. Today, whatever random question enters your mind can be answered by pulling out your phone and searching Google or ChatGPT. This is good, because who doesn’t want easy access to information?

Still, the conveniences afforded by modern technology have come at the expense of a virtue associated with analog wisdom: delayed gratification. Because we have become so accustomed to accessing information and resources on demand, the skill of delayed gratification is increasingly difficult to develop.

The fruit of patience: joy

Recalling some of my earliest holiday memories, I remember how exciting it was to see wrapped presents under the Christmas tree. As much as my siblings and I wanted to, we couldn’t open the presents until Christmas Day. It was an exercise in patience.

Consider this additional example from Levy’s grand opening at El Con. Beginning November 6, 1960, ten days before the grand opening, Levy’s placed ads in the paper featuring an artist’s rendition of various departments in the store: The Children’s Shop, Home Furnishings, Men’s Store, and Shoe Salon. These hand-drawn illustrations provided Tucsonans with their first glimpses of the store’s interior. Imagine how these sketches heightened anticipation for the store opening, which, by then, was only days away. The artist renderings provided the public with its first peek inside the building, and after months of waiting, that had to be satisfying.

From top left to bottom left (clockwise order), Levy’s Shoe Salon, Home Furnishings, Men’s Wear Section, and Children’s Shops.

If watching A Charlie Brown Christmas as a kid taught me anything, it was this: modern doesn’t always mean better. In the TV special, Charlie Brown is sent to the tree lot to buy the largest aluminum tree available—a trendy item at the time. As we know, Charlie Brown didn’t go with the modern option. He chose a scrawny little pine instead. As Charlie Brown figured out, sometimes the classics are just better than modern alternatives.

Reclaiming the Wait: Cultivating Delayed Gratification in Your Life

For those looking to blend the best of the past with the present, I recommend this: Make a conscious effort to cultivate delayed gratification. In a world that demands instant access to information and everything else, practice sitting with uncertainty. Not everything requires an immediate answer; waiting often provides the perspective needed to fully understand or appreciate a situation.

When Tucsonans learned that Levy’s was coming to El Con, the city’s first regional shopping center, they had to wait more than a year and a half for the store’s opening. After more than twenty-two months of watching the building slowly take shape, imagine the exhilaration they felt while flipping through the pages of the newspaper and stumbling upon the artist renderings of the store interior. This kind of excitement only comes from delayed gratification.

Making Space for the Wait Brings a Deeper, Irreplicable Satisfaction

Make space for the wait, and you cultivate a skill that brings a kind of satisfaction that nothing in the digital world can replicate.

Footnotes

¹Curtain is raised on levy’s new el con store. (1960, November 15). Tucson Citizen, p. 25.

²Curtain is raised on levy’s new el con store. (1960, November 15). Tucson Citizen, p. 25.