Shopping Boomerang

My wife likes to shop.

The key word here is 'shop'. It is a usual, nondescript four-letter-word of the English language. But when my wife gets hold of it, she fills enough activity into this innocuous word to put to shame a colony of terns during mating season.

As far as I know, the objective of the process of shopping is to end up with possession of something either tangible, like a 'good', a piece of clothing, maybe a gadget, shoes or an intangible, a 'service' - say a massage or a haircut.

For my wife, the actual purchase (e.g. Obtaining legal ownership of a 'good') is just a very small part of the larger whole. Just like genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, for her shopping is 99% experience and 1% money changing hands. If one were to skip the process entirely and vault straight to the purchase itself, there is an acute feeling of un-fulfillment.

My wife is a very active shopper. I don't mean to say she shops actively, but that she is very active during shopping. There is a lot of brisk walking, climbing stairs, zipping through aisles, avoiding carts and shoppers, jumping over fallen merchandise, multiple, lightning fast trying of clothes...you get the idea: It is like a sanitized, urbanized obstacle course from a firm that provides concrete-jungle survival training. The activity is not only physical, it is also mental. It involves complex queuing strategies to minimize time spent in checking out as well as waiting for trial rooms, mental mathematics (how much is the total discount if I get an additional 10% on my card plus there is a 0.3% cashback on all purchases) and complex aesthetic dilemmas: whether this would go with that and does it match the cushions?

It is as you can see a complete workout for body, mind and soul.

Yes, the soul part kicks in with the satisfaction of the purchase (immediate) or the satisfaction of the non-purchase (delayed) and also by the fact that now she knows: the knowledge of this amorphous truth gives rise to an ephemeral, transcendental, inner stillness, a strange sort of peace that lasts until you meet someone who has seen something that you (she) haven't (hasn't) on sale.

My roles in all of this are manifold - a Consigliere ("Yes, this one does look better"), a Porter ("You go ahead I have the bags"), a Calculator ("25% on 2 for 3 and an additional 10% on your card comes to cheaper than the dress you saw in the other place"), a Friend ("Of course, we have a bit more time"), a Second ("Here's water for you, now you can go back in"), a Marker ("Hold my place in the queue" and me standing there holding a dress with large red flowers, getting glares from women who missed it), a Banker (" ")...

Excursions like these leave me a tired man.

I calculate percentage discounts in my sleep. My wife feels these are numbers from my day job.

I have nightmares where dresses chase me down dark alleys, grab hold of me and ask me what shoes they'd go with...It is a harrowing experience.

And then I had a brainwave. The Internet.

If we could shop online, we could save, if nothing else the physicality of shopping. We could do it while watching TV (I with the remote on my hand, she with the laptop in her lap). We could do it while both of us were with our laptops - I could check scores online while she did her shopping, I could of course give my sage comments from time to time and excel or the calculator would help with the calculations. Plus the shoes and existing wardrobe were at hand. No more feats of memory to recall how what looked. We could just pull it out of whatever nook or cranny it was secreted in and check.

I thought I had a winner.

Now all I had to do was to get her to back it.

And this is where I learnt the shopping equation I had quoted earlier. 99% experience 1% payment.

The internet superstreamlined the 1%. The 99% still asked the shopper to make a leap of faith in terms of what it would look like ("Under white light?" "Under yellow light?" "?!"), what it would feel like, what it would fall like, what it looked like on a rack and even what sort of people picked it up (This last bit of shopping I never suspected).

There was work to be done yet before my projected increase in TV time transformed into reality. I approached it stealthily. I had a plan.

Our first purchase was a vacation. Flight tickets, hotel rooms et al. It worked. My wife was happy that we went on a vacation. ("Finally!" as she said). Look Honey, no fraud.

We then ventured into the realm of clothing. We started small. Literally. We bought baby clothes. Standard sizes, standard colours, cute things written. Payment made, no fraud (again), delivery received.

It took three evenings (and two missed games), but then a convert is worth a thousand saints, so I persevered.

The leap to non-baby clothing took longer.

We went and tried a few websites. Looked at some stuff, even filled a shopping cart. And came off without buying because we were not convinced.

The non-shopping that we did online took the better part of all the evenings of a week. I was at a loss to counter this. We had dinners and lunches to get to the bottom of this non-purchase activity. It was then that I stumbled upon a rule of shopping. It is the Proximity Price Inversion Rule. Basically, it states that the desire to gain possession of an object is proportional to its proximity till a certain price. Beyond that price, the lure is higher if you cannot gain proximity to said object.

In short, if you can touch it, you want to buy it, till a certain price. Beyond that price, you want to buy it if you cannot touch it.

Most clothes unfortunately fall under the first part of the rule of proximity. I was in a muddle now. The evenings I had spent in getting the wife to browse and get hooked on looked like being an expense rather than an investment.

"I am certain it is cheaper here than in an actual shop. They pay no rent!"

"But they do have an actual shop here on which they do pay rent. They can't have stuff selling for higher in the same city."

"They can."

"But we'll pay shipping. So it will come to the same thing."

"I have a voucher for free shipping." I omitted to tell her that it was one time offer. Get her hooked on first.

"Anyway I can't buy something without trying it on first. I need to see how it feels."

And that was that.

Ultimately though she found a solution as always. It is the best of both worlds.

We went out shopping. We tried clothes and sizes and saw how the colours looked in different lights and saw the fall of the fabric and felt the feel of it.

Then we went home and ordered it online at leisure.

My leisure.