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)
