- Sweet Escape: it has been observed over the decades that shopping is associated with escaping from problems that one faces in life. Shopping for clothes or shoes or home essentials or cars or even gadgets provide respite from a stressful situation. Who says that shopping to avoid problems is a permanent solution to all issues in life; on the other hand shopping successfully helps in temporarily bringing out from a particular problem so why should this escape be unacceptable? Like eating deserts, shopping is another innocent way of temporarily escaping from some issues in one’s life.
- Budget Management: what comprise of a major part of your budget is purchasing and well purchasing is in a layman’s term shopping. When you have a fixed budget, there is an obvious need of spending within the fixed limit, and thus when you go shopping you have the division of budget already in mind. It could be 10 percent of your salary to be spent on shopping for clothes or grocery etc. Basically budget management is a prerequisite to shopping, even if you have loads of money you intend to spend on shopping, there still is an upper limit. This upper limit enables to stick within what one can afford, while shopping for different items.
- Decision Making: since customers are the king of the market these days, there is a wide range of products offered to them. The customers are thus required to shop sensibly and make wise decisions. As the customers are exposed to a variety of products, decision making at the time of shopping becomes an indispensable part of the process.
- Self Esteem Building: say you are in an apparels store, off to shop for yourself, you put on a dress, that dress makes you look extremely beautiful. Looking at yourself at that very moment helps in building your self esteem. It gives you a different sense of confidence. Apart from the confidence, in simple words it makes you happy.
- Source of entertainment: for some fortunate ones, for whom money is not an issue, shopping becomes a leisure time activity. Disha Jindal a second year student at Hindu college, University of Delhi is a shopaholic and she says “while I shop at stores of different brands, I love spending time and taking a look at the new products that the brand has released in the recent past. Say if Chanel has released a new range of designer purses, so I take my time in viewing the entire range, noting the differences in the patterns, designs etc. So I can actually spend hours and hours shopping (which is both window shopping and shopping) and for me shopping is the greatest source of entertainment”
- Fills emptiness: for some shopping is a means of filling some sort of emptiness in their life, when one is sad, they go out and shop. For such people shopping brings the same kind of impact like meeting a friend does on other people, it makes one happy and puts an end to the loneliness.
- Makes you street smart: once you become aware of good places (basically cheap) to shop from, you become street smart. Since you have shopped at various stores or say shacks, you know what the prices are. This knowledge of the prices will make sure that no shopkeeper makes a fool out of you by charging more than the actual price of the product. You are also aware of the exact places you can buy different items from and hence you save time and effort in searching for the same.
