Why You Buy More Than You Think In Malls

Where is your favourite mall? Imagine yourself inside it. You decided to buy a pair of running shoes. Just a pair running shoes. But with its big ON SALE sign across halls, wide array of clothes, beauty products, etc, etc.. You ended up with a number of shopping bags. Inside-- traveling pillow, bag, new headset, powerbank, new t-shirt and lastly, your running shoes. Then it hit you. Your credit card is badly hurt or worst,  you won’t be eating right for the next 2 weeks to cope up with your diminishing budget.

Good evening fellow toastmasters! Life is tricky. There are times that despite our strong will to just stick to what we need, we ended up wanting and getting things that are not supposed to be part of our list. But what is it with malls that make us disobedient shoppers?

Come let us go shopping as we uncover the science of malls!

Let us start at the very entrance. Here, there is nothing much to look at. It’s called the decompression zone. Purposely designed for you to acclimatize. Designed to allow us contemplate about proper spending mode.

And then once you are into the mode…

What scientist called scripted disorientation technique kicks in…

 Have you noticed that there are no clocks in malls? Inside we enjoy so much of the goods and bargains and the next time we know it, it’s closing time. Usually we can tell what time of day it is but inside you can’t. Unless you check your watch once in a while which is rarely. This is so because aside from having no clock inside, you can rarely have a view of the outside. Plus the lighting and color schemes. It’s  always day inside and the more we think it is still early to go home yet, the more we are vulnerable to throwing unnecessary stuff to our shopping cart. A very genius way of skewing our perception about time.

Malls. They are designed to make you spend money and sometimes you do not realize it making you vulnerable to impulse buying. Something called the invariant right is one of the culprits. You see, we grow up to walk and drive keeping right. Unconsciously, we also do so in our shopping and the retailers knowing this keep their bargains and most of their goods at the right.  So maybe next time you like to keep left? :)

And same thing is applied in supermarkets! You see, they could have put the condiments, the meat and the dairy in the same aisle for us to save time. Are they just so OC about arrangements? You buy meat and because you need ingredients in cooking it, you have to go to the condiments section. And on your journey there, a lot of discounted products caught your eye and before you get to the section you intend to, you have a bottle of shampoo in your cart.

Christmas is fast approaching. And in this season of giving, a well thought gift is well appreciated by receivers. Be it a signature bag or a simple pen, malls offer us the convenient venue to shop. But remember, malls can make or break us. It may have almost everything we need but if we won’t be cautious, we might be spending for something we don’t truly need.

Life is tricky. But as tricky as it seems, there are always ways out. One is, knowing the shop for wise SHOPPING.

Happy Holidays!

Basic Speech No. 8 (Pioneer Trailblazers Toastmasters Club)