| Pros and cons of The Noisy Method |
Dec 16, 2008 9:51 am
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So, look. I know I'm a hopeless case when it comes to shopping. I'm a complete slob and I have no patience for the activity. I'm like an 18 year old boy. In and out as fast as possible. I never comparison shop. I make decisions and spend hundreds of dollars in the blink of an eye.
There are times I come home with a dud. At those times I lament the fact I am a slob, but I know that on balance, the strategy works for me more often than it doesn't, so I accept The Noisy Method as a sound, if flawed, approach to surviving the mall experience.
To wit:
- When I was buying my road bike, which I spent around $1500 on, I half-heartedly went to two shops because I had a sense that I was supposed to look around before spending that much money. At the second shop, I bought the first bike that was shown to me, and I love it. Love it!
- A couple winters ago I needed a new pair of winter boots. I walked into a store, looked at a servicable style, asked for my size, tried them on, and they fit. Why would I continue looking at this point? I bought them and that was that.
- A couple months ago I needed some new clothes. I went to Old Navy, zoomed around the store in about 7 or 8 minutes and picked up about 15 articles of clothes, tried them all on and bought about ten of them. Done. Out in 20.
- I ordered my first computer on the phone, after seeing an ad in the free commuter paper. I didn't give a shit about specs, so long as I could make CDs and surf the net at a decent speed. Eighteen hundred bucks, gone in 60 seconds.
- I bought my thousand dollar high definition big screen TV after consulting for 20 minutes with a guy at The Brick (a Canadian furniture/electronics warehouse sort of chain).
- Even my wedding dress was a first choice off the rack.
I guess my feeling is, stuff is for the most part just stuff. One big screen HDTV is going to give the same picture quality as another. If a bike costs $1500, it's gonna be good no matter what. I'm not Lance frickin Armstrong, you know?
Alas, on Saturday I was in a massive hurry to buy some new shoes to go with the (also hurriedly purchased) outfit I'd bought for my sister's wedding on Sunday. I had a million things to do that day and shopping for shoes in the winter when you've been walking around the mall in winter boots and your feet are all sweaty and probably smelly is just so gross.
So I went to Payless so I could serve myself, picked out a nice wine-coloured pair that Stacey London would have been proud of (observe the pointy tips), tried on a 7 and winced. Too tight. Tried on a 7½ and thought, hmmm, kinda loose. But I've bought shoes in a hurry before and when you get the too-tight size, man do you suffer. So I bought the 7½ shoes after approximately 15 seconds of deliberation.
The next day, the Dawg and my fabulous niece and nephew and I are all getting dressed for the wedding in our Montreal hotel room and I get out these new shoes and oh my god. I can't walk across the room without them practically falling off (so much for Stacey's approval). God I'm an idiot. Why am I such a shopping slob? Why do I do this to myself? Everybody laughed at me and I stuffed like, half a roll of toilet paper into them, trying to get them to fit. It worked okay. At times you could see a bit of white peeking out of the ginormous gap between the shoe and my heel. Whatever, who's looking at my feet at beautiful kid sister's wedding?
(In addition, the outfit that I bought made me look plump and matronly. Noisy shopping score: 0h for 2.)
All of this would be less stupid if I hadn't cavalierly tossed the receipt for the shoes into my office garbage bin on Saturday, thinking, "as if I'm gonna return shoes!" They look fine and I could certainly return them if I still had the damn receipt. And if I hadn't taken Monday off to travel back home from Montreal, the receipt would have still been in my office gargage bin today.
But that's the chance you take with The Noisy Method. It's shopping on the edge!
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