You will be given a massive shopping list and a tight deadline. Your days will consist of being pushed and shoved and out-shopped by thousands of other damned souls crushed into this same commercial hell.

You will not get help from the sales assistants. You will wait in line for an hour to purchase a single knick-knack. You will face ridicule, contempt, depleted stock and Muzak 24-7.

In other words, it will be pretty much like holiday shopping right now.

While living a virtuous existence may spare you the eternal anguish of mall hell in the afterlife, it's pretty tough to avoid the slings and arrows of malls in December during the living years.

I genuinely attempted a mall boycott this year and failed. No matter how much you plan to rely on online shopping, there are many things for which a trip to the mall is requisite. It is sad, but true.

Well, almost true.

A Toronto image consulting firm called Mind Over Image has designed a holiday-specific online service for the mall weary: personal shopping.

Think about this for a moment. They have people willing to enter malls during the holiday season with your personal gift list, make the purchases on your behalf and send them to you.

It is hard to image such people exist.

They are proxy shoppers, purchasers for hire, offering reprieve from the horror -- for a price.

To begin, you fill out a form on the company's Web site listing your purchases and how much you want to spend on each gift, a list of recipients, their relationship to you, their age, hobbies and interests.

Your list then goes to Prakriti Saxena and her "network of expert shoppers."

"We have relationships with a lot of different retailers already so we can actually save money because they can get deals," the Web site promises.

Saxena will pull together a list of ideas and run them by you based on your online order. Pick the ones you want, and then she's of to the mall to collect the stash. She says she can generally get your choices delivered to you in a day or so.

The company pitch for the personal shopper service is based on the promise of helping avoid both panic and embarrassment.

"Stay away from last minute dashes, forgotten gifts, and oftentimes, overspending," it reads. "We will impress your loved ones by getting them things that they will absolutely adore. Never again will they mock your taste in gifts!!"

As one whose taste in gifts is mocked annually, this instantly sucks me in.

Now the damage part.

The service costs $60 for the purchases of between one and four gifts (in addition to the actual cost of the gifts themselves). Up to 10 gifts rings in at $70.

You'll need to do your own math on what mall avoidance is worth to you. But for the genuinely mall-averse, $60 or $70 seems a remarkably small price to pay for holiday shopping salvation.