Saving Money With Selective Shopping

Use Selective Shopping When You Shop

So, with all the deals in cyberspace and the mall, would a new approach to shopping make a difference, an approach that might make it easier to shop successfully? Then read these shopping tips to try the next time you’re out and about.

What is Selective Shopping?

Selective shopping suggests criteria for discerning differences when you shop, and the top criterion is how cheap is the desirable thing you want to buy.

What kind of discerning are you suggesting, you ask?

1. Looking at the price
2. Looking at the store
3. Looking at the brand
4. Looking at the bargains offered

Price checks are accomplished by looking an item online. The store name means a lot too, as well as the brand. The last point, bargains offered, is a little misleading. This is not a how-to bargain shop, where you hit the bargain bins at your favorite store. That’s a great way to shop, but selective shopping is different.

In that vein, I’m suggesting the presence of hidden bargains that only price-savvy customers might see — though nothing’s set in stone.

Shop Everywhere, Shop Often

Obviously, there are times of year when bargain shopping is at a premium, like during the holidays. That’s what Black Friday is, right? It’s not the day somebody died or anything like that? It’s the day or days or weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas when stores are white hot competitive. It’s the biggest retailing time of the year!

Why Should People Shop Selectively?

Conservation

First, selective shopping means conservation. You shop selectively when you want to conserve your resources, that is, your hard-earned cash for whatever reason you want to conserve. Maybe you’re saving for a rainy day, or maybe a Caribbean cruise. Selective shopping could help you work on your savings goals.

Stop Overspending

Overspending is one of the biggest contributors to credit card debt. This is less about saving money than it is about maintaining a budget. Most people can’t “budget shop” effectively because budgeting is hard and boring, and that leads to failure. With selective buying, you’re engaging your sense of taste and value to arrive at a conclusion about buying. So, as far as fun shopping goes, the extra critical-thinking steps you take make it more entertaining than budget buying.

Research your shopping trip

Let’s face it. Most of us are already researching our consumer buys now. The level of distrust we have for retailers, in particular online retailers, is considerable, and the reasons are varied, but one factor included in the trust question is price point. Whatever, we check out the price online of say a camera, and we compare it to the price in the retail store. In truth, we may make a buying decision on an important end of research, to discover the “availability.”

Anyway, these three values drive selective shopping and are aided greatly by a smartphone, not only to generate prices but also budget and spending sensibilities, in the form of a budget tool. As Jane Austin might say, we’re going from sum-and-obtainability-sense-to-sensibility-is-the-sole-sensible-course, among other tongue twisters.

Is Selective Shopping a Way to Solve Shopping Problems

Depending on what shopping problems you’re having, I would hesitate to make some universal claims, but yes, it solves shopping problems. Here are some shopping problems:

• The-rush-of-excitement-when-buying problem
• Buyer regret problem
• Squandering problem
• Hiding-purchases-from-loved-one problem

While we laugh at these problems, we all recognize them, so it suggests we all suffered from shopping ills at one time or another. Okay, maybe the very rich don’t have these problems, but most ordinary people do.

By selective shopping, you not only engage in critical thinking — about your tastes, the value of an item, about your budget — but you can also include in the processes your spouse, siblings, parents, and friends, all of whom could input in the decision-making process. Share the fun. The more voices in your shopping decisions, the more likely consensus wins out. That should solve all the problems listed above.

Mall Shopping

Mall shopping has had problems for a while now, but the latest run of shop closings in malls lately has been about COVID-19. Sure, who doesn’t want the food court to be accessible from the parking lot? However, store retailers realigned their stores in other ways to stay competitive. They’re pushing personal services with more customer service. They’ve developed their online presence, syncing their retail store to their online store. And they market to a new generation of consumers.

Check out today’s mall. It’s all about future generations.

Who Takes Cold Hard Cash? Malls Do!

If you haven’t guessed, this blog assumes people like shopping online and in retail stores, despite the trend toward online shopping. Because transactions made electronically are fraught with horrors like identity theft, credit card theft, debit card theft, and fraudulent online scammers posing as retailers, heading back to the mall once in a while with cold cash in your wallet is a welcome experience for people who enjoy shopping.

It might be nice to never pull out the cards. So, head out to the mall and enjoy selective shopping in a beautiful, climate-controlled place.

Retailers will be thrilled to see you. The Internet is an invention, and it has reinvented shopping, it goes without saying. But like any invention we humans make, as Professor Mumford says, it has re-invented us. The Internet made us aware of the global marketplace (a vast and wonderful place) and on the Internet, selective shopping is the rule, especially with all the information technology to help. Retailers in the mall haven’t missed any of it, and you will find selective shopping works there too.

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