Monday, April 28, 2008

Cat's Take on the Importance of Shopping


28 Apr 2008

One of my favourite activities is shopping. I bet I share the same fascination with loads of other girls, when it comes to buying things we want. Frankly speaking, our countless retail theraphy sessions do have their perks.

1) De-stress after a hard day's or week's work - we need to reward ourselves for good jobs done right? Or maybe a little cheering up when something doesn't turn up the way we'd expected. In short, it's still cheaper than paying a professional psychiatrist. Wishing for the company (aka boss) to reward us, hmm, it only happens once every year or nothing at all.

2) Make this world a better, happier place - women gets to buy what they want, women feels contented, women gets less annoyed by the men who spent after workhours glued to the TV watching nothing but sports (duhh..), there's less likelihood of domestic argument. See? Not so bad eh. They should list shopping rebate as part of income tax requirement. After all, it promotes not only nationwide peace, but "World Peace"... hmm, to propose this to Ministry of Women, Family & Community Development.

3) Promotes healthier lifestyle - remember the time when you see that gorgeous to-die-for dress you have seen only in your dreams, being on display in a mall? How your heart beats faster and your face flushes with joy? Well, that's cardio burn-out if you ask me. And, I haven't mention those long walks circling the mall when we go form shop to shop trying to find the best item at the best bargain? 'Nough said.

4) On-spot training on purchasing, QC, finance - when we bargain we are practicing our skills at purchasing, haggling for the lowest price for the best valued items in the market. Then, we get to try out our skills at QC by selecting the item with the least glue, defect, bruise, etc form the pile. There's a chance of pressing the price lower if there's no "Grade-A" item in the pile. This requires negotiation skills. Then we must be able to calculate the discounted price from the original price to know how well we did in bargaining. After which, to know the exact change from the note we gave the vendor. If not, why waste saliva haggling for so long...??

5) Contributes to economy of 3rd world countries - how many of us can shamelessly declare that one of the joys of visiting 3rd world countries, is shopping for local items at a bargain, plus the currency exchange is a bonus. Imagine being millionnaires and being generous to the local enterprises? Be it an excuse to get souvenirs for those at home or heck-since-I-spent-a-fortune -to-get-here-might-as-well-I-buy-something-for-memory's-sake, it's not dispute that we do contribute to the local economy. Now, I might want to link this to point #2.

The list of perks go on. I'm gonna leave the rest to your imagination. I'm going to dream of shopping sessions tonight - ah, happy happy dreams that keep me at work 12 hours a day.. ;-)