Saturday, July 26, 2008

Shopaholism Revisited

There's this e-mail that has done the rounds any number of times, which talks about the differences between men and women. One of the things it says is that a man will pay two bucks for an item worth one buck that he needs. A woman, on the other hand, will pay one buck for a something worth two that she doesn't need, but it's on sale.

Well, that's not exactly what we do. What we do is, we plan a shopping trip when we hear that there's a sale on at our favourite store. Then we go through all the sale items and don't find anything we like. Eventually we pick something that's really nice, but it's not on sale. We don't pay a rupee for a two rupee item. We pay the two rupees. Now we don't need this two rupee item either. It's just that we came out here to shop. And shop we will. Because it makes us feel good. Makes us feel nice and pretty. And that's really important in our world, you know.

Those who've seen How I Met Your Mother will recall how Lily, one of the female protagonists on the show, accumulates an insane amount of credit card debt by shopping for designer clothes and shoes every time she's upset about something. That's a slightly extreme version of what we all do. Today I bought some stuff that I'd actually been eyeing for a while but deemed too expensive. Today I got it at half price. Now because it was half price, I bought a little more than what I needed. And that, my dear readers, made me feel awesome.

By the way, interesting little write up on Wikipedia about the more extreme form of compulsive shopping. Did you know it's called oniomania? I didn't. Quite possibly, Alok did, going by his comment on my earlier blog entry on this subject.

No comments: