This is Part 1 of the ‘Shopping & Your Psychology’ series - a series of articles that is going to change the way you shop forever. More importantly it’s going to drastically increase the amount of satisfaction you get from what you buy. A Big Promise? Perhaps. Lets quickly run through what makes shopping fun for you. Some of the Pluses of Shopping are

1. Shopping’s fun.
2. Retail Therapy.
3. You can get things you really like.
4. You can get useful things.
5. The newness and there’s always stuff to explore.

How important are these to you? What other benefits are there? Leave a comment and i’ll add them in.

At the same time there are a few downsides to shopping

1. It does cost you money (i wish shopping were free)
2. You might end up buying things you don’t really need - compulsive/impulsive buys
3. You might end up spending more than you can afford - overspending
4. Someone could trick you into paying more than a product is worth
5. Shopping can be boring if there isn’t enough cool stuff or you can’t get what you want. I used to face this at nordstrom rack in the us - 1 trip out of 3 i’d find an absolutely amazing bargain. The other two trips were a waste though.

Anyways, now that you’ve thought about the pluses and minuses of shopping for you i’ll explain this article better - it helps you understand why you shop the way you do, offers some general insights, and gives tips to begin to shop better. You can jump straight to whatever topic you fancy.

Why is Shopping Fun

There are a lot of reasons -

1. There’s sheer joy in how you feel when you buy something and own it - it’s yours. This is stronger for some people who become lifelong collectors. However, that same streak is in all of us, and we like to acquire and collect and possess.
2. Shopping well is a skill - We all have times when we found that one perfect item. There are times when you or one of your friends got a superb bargain - perhaps even both of you. I remember the thrill when i found this amazing store in seattle (called ian’s - it had amazing stuff + it had a great sale) - In the course of the next 3-4 days 6 of my friends and me had bought things from there.
3. Newness - our bodies are wired so that we LOVE discovering new things and navigating through the sensory experience. Perhaps its the hunter-gatherer in our genetics. Chemically speaking, in any new situation when we have to navigate through options and figure out a solution a chemical called dopamine is released in our brains and this makes shopping, finding new things and making purchase decisions very pleasurable.
4. If you love clothes then buying clothes is fun - this is common sense. Book lovers love book stores, and so forth. We gravitate towards what we love. I have friends who talk about the feeling of being completely surrounded by books and holding a book in your hand and the smell of the paper. For me, it’s more of being in a winestore or a clothes shop than a bookstore - however i hope you get the picture.
5. Finding a deal and the satisfaction of that - sometimes our focus can be more on the deal aspect of a purchase than the purchase itself. Even in cases where we want something for itself, getting good value for money is exciting.
6. It can be a community thing - whether its with friends or parents or even someone who doesn’t like to shop as much as you do it is a joint experience. There are so many social shopping startups trying to take advantage of this.

There are a lot more reasons - however the only reasons that are important are what makes it fun for you. and its good to know and understand your reasons for loving shopping so that you can maximize the fun of shopping.

A lot of the rest of the article is about How to keep shopping fun and how to maximize it. It really is a ‘you decide the order’ list so browse through it in any way you like.

What is your Budget and what does Money mean to you?

Much more important than money is how you think of it and your attitudes towards it. I’ll list three things that i’ve found extremely valuable

1. Money - 10% of what you earn is yours to keep. This is from a book called ‘The Richest Man in Babylon’. Given how the economy has been it would be more appropriate to make it 20% or even 30% now. The crux of the idea is that of all your earnings there should be a set percentage that you keep aside. This is not savings - this is money for yourself that you can invest (literally and figuratively) into yourself and your future.
2. Money should never take precedence over happiness.
3. Money is a resource and money is not as important of a resource as time. If it takes you an extra 1 hr to save 10 pounds - its never worth it. Its very easy to earn an extra 10 pounds. That 1 hr of your life is never coming back.

Moving back to money and your budget - you really should look at your budget and assess it in terms of what is that money really getting you …

Shopping is almost always Buying Emotion
A lot of the time, what we are really buying is a particular feeling. We are buying how a pair of shoes will make us feel. We are buying the comfort of a certain brand because wearing it tells us that we are sophisticated and well to do. You look at an ad and say - wow, they look like they just had amazing sex - it must be the jeans. Abercrombie and Fitch is a great example of this - yes, they have good clothes - however the brand is built around the perception of sex. Wearing Abercrombie & Fitch = having sex with beautiful people.
With a lot of our shopping we are buying what we think that product will get us - the feeling, the image in front of others.

Shopping is Retail Therapy
During the research for this article i found two things that are so common sense that it would make sense to have to have a full study done to be able to state them i.e.

1. You will tend to buy more when you are sad.
2. We tend to buy more when we are hungry, especially for groceries.

In addition to how wearing things or possessing them will make us feel, the very act of acquiring them is therapeutic. When appropriate its completely ok to do retail therapy. However, a big secret is that you don’t have to spend a ton of money to feel good as there are a ton of ways to do therapy - not just retail. If you want a pick me up would you rather see a movie with a friend, or spend 100 pounds on a dress, or eat an ice cream? These are just 3 out of a million different ways to change how you feel.

Shopping can be an Investment

Actually, lets jump ahead to the next topic because it covers this one too.

Shopping helps form a part of our Identity - because our clothes are symbols that communicate who we are.

To be more precise, there are a few things that combine to create your first impression on others. In addition, 97% of the time this is the impression of you they’ll have forever. To be brutally honest, what people think of you in the first 7 seconds of seeing/meeting you is what they think of you for the rest of their lives. Yes there is the 3% of times when we can change what people think of us. However its much better to form a great first impression by understanding the key things people notice about you -

1. How you look at them - your eye contact.
2. Your body language.
3. Your clothes and how you wear them.
4. The colours and matching of your clothes.
5. The age, condition and perceived cost of your clothes.
6. Your grooming.
7. Your posture and how you carry yourself.
8. Your facial gestures.
9. Your health and fitness level.

Its really important to accept the reality that people look at your clothes and use that to draw conclusions about who you are, where you’re from, what kind of person you are, and a lot more. That’s why shopping for clothes and accessories is so important - the clothes you wear and how you wear them form a crucial part of what people think of you.

This might not sound very idealistic - however, this is reality. We would all like for people to actually take the time to understand us - however, that’s impossible since we run across hundreds of people every day. So all of us use shortcuts and things like a person’s posture, clothes, grooming, facial expressions to figure out who to focus our attention on (if at all) and what to think of people.

Shopping really is choosing what becomes a part of your life, and what you buy directly relates to what everyone else thinks of you. Of course, who you are is the main thing - however shopping can add or detract from who you are.

A quick check …

At this point (hopefully) you have a better understanding of some of the aspects of shopping and what it adds to your life. The next few topics are just insights into more aspects of shopping

Consumerist Culture

What’s happened is that because people in sales understand human nature much better than the common man and because its easy to get misled by money, there is a Consumerist Culture that has taken over our lives. There are two fundamental things that are hugely wrong here

1. The focus and message drilled into you is to ‘buy’ things to make yourself complete, to feel better, to be happy. This is absolute nonsense. People are about as happy as they choose to be (Lincoln said that). You decide how happy you’ll be - not what you buy, or how much money you have.
   The focus should instead be in figuring out what gives you lasting happiness. And yes buying and acquiring things would probably be a part of it - however it would not be the focus.
2. Instead of focusing on people’s strengths and the things and psychological factors that REALLY help people, the focus is to exploit their vulnerabilities. What i mean is that the focus is not on your virtues, helping you understand what you really want, helping you figure out the purpose of your life, and adding genuine value to people’s lives. Instead there are more and more companies that are tending towards - how do we use people’s greed/sloth/lust/envy etc. to sell them things.

From an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing wrong with this - it is survival of the fittest - however, the odds are stacked so much in favour of companies and marketing and salespeople it becomes unfair. Also, we’re in the 21st century and perhaps we can look at more cooperative ways - surely, there are a lot of win-win scenarios that can be created that helps both you and the companies you buy things from. The good news is - there are a decent number of companies already doing this.

So what exactly am i advocating instead of a consumerist ‘buy as much as you can’ culture? Quite simply to shop smart and buy things that you really want.

How to figure out quality
The first and most important thing in shopping is to figure out quality. The act of shopping and aquiring something is definitely pleasurable - however owning something that for years gives you happiness is far more satisfying.
So if you look at shopping as how to buy something that will give you a lot of value/satisfaction over the years, quality becomes paramount. And there are three critical factors

• Your Budget - what would you ideally like to pay and what is the most you would pay. Keep in mind that (provided you have done your research and made an intelligent purchase) - you really do get what you pay for. My grandfather used to say - an expensive thing makes you cry once, a cheap thing makes you cry every day.
• Do you know what you Really Want? What you are really looking for? This again comes back to what do you really want to buy - is it a TV, or is it sunday afternoons watching the game with friends, or is it showing off the TV, or is it being able to see movies on a larger screen. The more clarity you have about what you want, the higher the chance you’ll get it. (Interestingly enough, this is true for every single thing in life).
• The quality of your research - The internet makes this so much easier - you can check reviews at Amazon, ask for advice on forums, use comparison shopping engines, use a site like mine for checking for discount codes. Its important to focus on sites whose focus is on unbiased actual research. A great example is Money Saving Expert - on the other hand if a site makes you jump through hoops and/or does a few things unethically, then be wary - because that probably translates into their focus not being on serving you well.

How to get value for money
It is imperative to understand that if you are buying something that is not quality - this is worthless. Part 3 of the series on ‘Shopping & your Psychology’ is going to focus exclusively on this. However, here are a few snippets till then.

Many people equate cheapest price with best value. Actually, cheapest price on the highest quality products is what you should aim for. The first step is always figuring out the 2 or 3 highest quality items that you could get in your budget (even a little higher). Once you have figured out the 2-3 products in particular that you have to choose between, then comes the part of ‘finding a store to buy it at’ and ‘getting the best value for money’. The first step here is to see what sales are going on

1. Sales - check out a site like mine for the latest sales.
2. Deals + Specials - check out the forums at moneysaving expert or my site for the latest deals.
3. Discount Codes - again the forums at money saving expert or here. i also do requests so let me know if you’re looking for a particular discount.

At this point you should have narrowed down 1 or 2 quality stores you want to buy from. And then look for deals for that store. I’m reluctant to recommend comparison engines because they restrict themslves to merchants paying them money. If you run a price comparison engine that shows ALL merchants and doesn’t have ‘favoured’ status email me and i’ll probably recommend you here. If you’re making a relatively big purchase and can’t find a deal or a voucher code let me know.

(Here’s me being a broken record again) I’ll stress again that for items that are big, one-off purchases one quality expensive purchase is usually much much better that buying 5 mediocre things that never give you value. This is doubly true for things you wear (shoes, bags, jeans, watches, etc.), things you put in your house (sofas, beds, furnishings) and things you eat.

Why do we have Favourite Stores and Favourite Brands?
This is a natural question since we’ve been talking about finding quality stores. When you look at what makes a store a favourite its a combination of the shopping experience, the selection, the customer service, the prices, the quality of products they carry and a whole lot of other factors. This process of choosing a store is exhausting and to save ourselves time we gravitate towards having favourites - favourite stores, favourite malls, and ‘our’ brands.

We basically have ’shortcuts’ and that’s great. It’s also important to periodically take a look at other stores and talk to friends and family for suggestions. Also, its good to have an eye out for deals and discounts that could make a different store a better option.

Clothes for Self Esteem

An aspect that I haven’t touched on before because it has more to do with the wearing of clothes than the buying is that often we make the mistake of thinking that ‘clothes make the man’. Truth is that clothes make the impression and for people who never get to know you they do form the entirety of who you are (i’m including things like posture in here). However, for the people that are really important in your life (or to be more precise as people get to know the real you) - the real you is infinitely more important than clothes.
That’s why its crucial to never buy and wear clothes that go against who you are as a person. Clothes should be about You and Your tastes. Its better to come off with flaws that are your flaws, than to come across as a poser or a try-hard. This is a huge, huge topic so perhaps i’ll talk about it more in a separate post.

Fashion Vs Personal Style

A really huge thing is to understand the difference between fashion guidelines and personal style. A fashion magazine’s job is to influence you into buying things - cosmetics, clothes, and so forth. Never let go of the distinction between a biased and an unbiased opinion. Fashion Magaines might not have a bias towards a designer or store - however they always have a bias towards the industry. Their business runs on ads and ads run on sales. A magazine’s job (and you can expand this to all media) is to influence people into doing what is good for the system since they are an integral part of it.

Think of fashion tips only as guidelines - how you think of yourself and your health and fitness are much, much more important than the clothes you wear and the brands you buy. Dictate your own style - if you must read up on fashion trends use them only as a guideline. With youtube and myspace and facebook its more and more about You and you making the decisions - its time for youFashion too.

Another equally important thing is to understand that fashion magazines hand pick people and use camera angles and lighting and airbrushing to make people look much much better than they look in real life. A study found that when teenage girls pick up a fashion magazine, they start feeling bad about themselves within 10-17 seconds. I’ve talked about how people tend to buy more when they’re sad - see the connection?

If we found happiness in ourselves we would no longer buy things we didn’t need and/or want. And that’d cause a huge problem for a lot of unethical industries and companies. So please keep this in mind the next time you read any magazines or watch an ad or watch tv - are they trying to help you or are they trying to get you into the consumer mindset?

[end of my rant ;)] Hopefully now you have a very good idea of a lot of your shopping psychology. This is just the beginning though - wait till you read about all the tricks that are used to get you to buy things you don’t really want. In the next article of this series i’ll talk about the various methods that marketers and companies use to entice us.

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