Shopping: an increasingly overthought endeavour

When I saw this recent article by Casey Johnston, Shopping Sucks Now being linked and commented by a few trusted people I follow, I admit I felt a bit bemused. I really like Johnston’s writing and style, and I know that, while the search for a good pair of gloves was a real necessity, it also served as an example. And yes, it’s true, there is so much choice today that choosing a product wisely, especially online, can be challenging.

But as I read her article, I started to wonder if perhaps the overthinking behind the whole shopping process is itself more overwhelming than the abundance of choice[1].

For a long time, our problem was there were not enough things to choose from. Then with big box stores, followed by the internet, there were too many things to choose from. Now there are still too many things to choose from, but also a seemingly infinite number of ways to choose, or seemingly infinite steps to figuring out how to choose. The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

The degree to which you feel this problem definitely depends on your income, or at least, being in the privileged position of not having to make do with the only thing you can afford. But for people with even a limited ability to make an investment purchase, if it’s worth it, there’s even more pressure to get it right. Knowing you wasted a big chunk of money on a cheaper, worse thing that falls apart when you could have spent a little more money on a thing that is good and lasts feels like failure. You’ve then wasted your money, wasted your time, you’ve contributed to global warming, and now you have to start the entire thing over again and hope you don’t somehow end up making the exact same mistake.

I don’t really feel this problem that much. And I think I fit the profile of the consumer who should feel this problem more:

I’m a budget-conscious customer. Being a freelancer, my income fluctuates constantly, but even when I have more money to spend on shopping for stuff, I tend to be penny-wise all the same; it’s my upbringing. Therefore, finding a good deal when I look for something is important to me. I hate wasting money.

When it comes to articles of clothing, I’m a particularly difficult customer. While my body shape isn’t ugly, it is such that finding trousers, shirts, jackets that are a good fit straight away is very hard for me. Sometimes I joke that I’d love to be rich only to be able to afford a personal tailor. So, again, when I’m shopping for clothes, it’s rarely a painless process.

Typically I’m not a cheapskate either. When looking for something to buy, I don’t take the shortcut of aiming low and going for the cheapest option.

But perhaps it’s because my way of shopping is still pretty much old-school.

I do most of my shopping at local, brick-and-mortar shops. I usually shop online for items I can’t find here; for items that are only available on the used market; and for items that are only available online (obviously). If I had to quantify, my offline/online shopping ratio is probably 70/30, maybe even 80/20.

For the reason stated above, I absolutely do not shop online for clothes (or eyewear, for that matter). I just can’t buy something without trying it or feeling it in my hand first. I know that a common policy for online clothing sellers is that you can easily return your purchases if you’re not satisfied with the items, but I find this to be an unnecessary hassle. I usually waste less time by going to a physical shop. Sure, there was an initial exploration phase where I tried several shops and clothing stores only to get out empty-handed, but now I know that all those places don’t have anything my size, and I know a few good places that do.

While I like to do my homework when I really need something specific, I still value competent advice provided by other humans right where I’m shopping. Yes, sometimes you’re in a shop ‘just browsing’ and you keep being approached by overeager clerks offering to help you. But there have been occasions when they were indeed helpful. The Tucano backpack I’m using most frequently now was suggested by a kind and informed clerk who told me it was a better value than the one I was interested in, while being very similar products in many other aspects. And she was right. In truth, I hadn’t even seen that Tucano backpack while I was browsing.

I own an especially good hat and an especially good pair of leather shoes — I’ve had both for at least 20 years — that were my easiest purchases, in a way. I went to a local hat shop, and told the owner what I was looking for in general terms. His decades-old expertise narrowed the choice for me as he presented me with a limited selection of suitable candidates. And, surely enough, the hat I wanted was among those. Same thing happened with the leather shoes. These items weren’t the best in their respective categories, but were quality products nonetheless, whose durability far exceeded my expectations. Were they expensive? Well, they weren’t Made-in-China cheap, but didn’t cost me a fortune either. Sometimes people don’t realise that the time you spend by willing to ask for help to a shop clerk (or, better, a shop owner) and willing to listen to their advice, isn’t always time wasted. Quite the contrary.

Most of my shopping happens before shopping. Do I need that new pair of shoes? Do I need that accessory? While I perfectly know that sometimes you don’t have to need something to want it; that sometimes you just want to make a ‘feel-good’ purchase; I nevertheless always ask myself those questions. This kind of self-check never hurts, especially if you’re a bit of a hoarder like I am and you’re renting an apartment. (Nothing like having to move out at a relatively short notice to make you regret many of your purchases and hoarding habits.)

I think that shopping experiences like the example Johnston makes in her article are increasingly common for people who shop almost exclusively online. They end up trapped by what they craved for in the first place: a wider choice, the comfort of shopping from your home, the illusion of saving time (and sometimes money). Back to my example of my good hat and leather shoes, if I had shopped for them online, it probably would have taken me several days of Web searches and comparisons before making a decision, and I’m fairly sure I would have ended up with worse products.

If it wasn’t clear enough (and it’s possible, since I’ve a penchant for digression), my main preventive measure to avoid overthinking or entering rabbit holes every time I have to shop for something, is to give myself artificial boundaries like time or space/scope:

Time — If I need a certain product, I will research possible candidates for a reasonably limited amount of time (e.g. a couple of days), then I will proceed to buy the best candidate found within that self-imposed time allotment. There may be the occasional exception; when I need something I’m not really familiar with (such as a UPS unit), the search for a suitable candidate may extend for a longer time period.

Space/scope — I won’t deny the convenience of purchasing stuff online. When you know what you want, it can be exhilarating just how quick and painless the process is. When I needed a new charging cable for my Pebble Time smartwatch, I opened eBay, searched for it, found a seller with a good reputation and reasonably close to me (= shorter waiting times once the item is shipped), clicked Buy It Now, and placed my order — all this in maybe less than five minutes. Other times, however, the sanest option is just searching for stuff locally. I don’t get people who spend hours looking for a good screwdriver on Amazon (of all places), then having the item shipped the next day with Amazon Prime; when you can buy one by going to a local hardware store and choosing among the many offerings, and you can just ask for advice in the store, if you’re not sure.

In fact, asking for someone else’s help can be a time saver. And I mean asking someone who has experience and expert knowledge regarding what you’re looking for. I’ve been told that asking advice from shopkeepers about something you’re looking for in their shops isn’t a great idea because they’re probably biased and they just want you to buy the thing from them. In my experience, this has happened very rarely. A bookseller once told me: I want happy customers. Happy customers are returning customers. And returning customers in turn make me happy.

I wanted to briefly return to something Johnston writes in a paragraph I already quoted at the beginning:

The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

This has never happened to me, thankfully. At least not with things “I need pretty badly”. Need should always be a stronger force than choice. Choice should never be this paralysing. When I have serious difficulty choosing a product among a series of candidates, and I’m pressed for time, and I need it (so I just can’t say Okay, let’s drop this for now, I’ll keep searching another day), then I’ll usually go for the ‘average’ offering. Thus, not the cheapest or suspiciously cheap product, and not the most expensive product either — especially when I have the feeling I’d only be paying for a brand name.

But that’s me. The more I’m writing about this, the more I have the feeling that I’m stating obvious things and ‘strategies’, or that I’m starting to overthink… so I’ll end this here.

1. One can also argue that maybe it’s the abundance of choice that leads to overthinking and ultimately to ‘shopping paralysis’. But I’ve also noticed an increasing number of people who approach shopping with an overthinking attitude even before facing the subsequent problem of abundance of choice. ↩︎