subject: Is There A Right Way To Shop? [print this page] Shopping is a decision making process, matching your needs and wants with the almost unlimited buying choices available. Even if we are careful with our money, we can all learn how to be more effective shoppers. If you look at all the hundreds of buying decisions you make over the course of the year, making the right decisions can add up to substantial savings. Your goal should be to live as well as possible while staying within your means.
Prioritizing
There may not be one right way to shop that fits everyone, but each of us can over time develop a shopping strategy that works best for them. Most individuals and households face budgetary constraints: they cant afford to purchase everything right now. The first consideration when designing your own right way to shop strategy is to prioritize your purchases, determining what goods or services are most important to your happiness, health, and personal fulfillment.
Lots of advice is available about how to become a smarter shopper, but it usually centers on purchasing less expensive merchandise, finding discounts or bargains. We all enjoy finding bargains, but it takes more than bargain hunting to become a truly smart shopper.
Again, the goal is to maximize your personal satisfaction and well being. Perhaps purchasing a designer label item once in a while gives you a boost of self-confidence. Maybe you dont mind cutting back in other areas, such as dining out, in order to treat yourself to these special purchases.
With some introspection you may realize that buying a brand name item really is not that important to you; a well made knockoff will work just fine. Shopping sounds like fun for most of us, and budgeting seems like a dreary exercise, but the two work hand-in-hand. Your budget helps guide you into the finding the right way to shop.
Planning
Learning the right ways to shop comes with experience and one aspect of this is advance planning. Acquiring knowledge about the products you intend to purchase, prior to visiting the store, is vital. Impulse buying is the wrong way to shop. Think about the supermarket, for example. The retailer places all sorts of enticing merchandise at the ends of each aisle in the hopes shoppers will pick it up and drop it in their shopping carts, almost without thinking about it.
Impulse clothes shopping can lead to a closet full of mismatched items, many of which will seldom or ever be worn. So planning your wardrobe, and prioritizing the most important purchases you need to make should be done before ever venturing out to the boutique or the online store. Each of the items you select should contribute to the overall look you are after. But of course you must know what style works best for you. Look through fashion or style magazines and clip out items that you think would look good on you. Run your ideas by a friend whose fashion sense you trust and see if they confirm your opinions. You want to enter the retail environment with a firm grasp of what you intend to purchase, instead of just wandering the aisles and hope something catches your eye.
In Store Research
On the other hand, you could make wandering a part of your shopping strategy. Visit one or more of your favorite stores, but prior to leaving the house make a pact with yourself that you are going out to look for ideas, not to make the actual purchase. When you get home, reflect on what you have learned and narrow down the choice to your favorite two or three. Then return to the store and see if you still want to purchase that item. You may find you are not as enamored of it the second time around.
As part of your information gathering process, having an awareness of when sales or inventory reductions take place can also result in more effective purchasing. There can be a difference between the heavily advertised saleswhich may or may not feature any true savings at alland the times of the year the retailer faces an overstock situation and needs to cut prices in order to move merchandise.
The Internet
The Internet is of course your best choice for product information, including where to find great deals. These days there are niche websites that retail anything you might be looking for. The search engines will direct you to popular sites, but be aware that if you type in a search discount laptop computers all the sites that come up may not be true discounters. What the Internet does for the shopper is to significantly widen the number of retailers from which to choose.
The Internet can also be a way of finding coupons that can be printed out to use at a brick and mortar store. The reverse is also true: look for coupons that come in the mail that offer discounts for online purchases.
With shopping, timing can be everything. Suppose you are in the market for a new kitchen cooktop. You can bookmark several sites that offer a good selection of cooktops, and then return to them periodically to see if there have been any price changes. Patience can be your ally when trying to find your own right way to shop.
