The Inspired Shopper

Pic: Grove Arcade bookstore, by Joel Kramer

Do you ever buy chipped things? I used to have a horror of anything that wasn’t perfect and whole, but now I embrace the odd chip, scratch or dent as long as it doesn’t detract from the look of a piece.


I bought this picture from the Brotherhood op shop in Bentleigh. It was very shabby chic when I bought it (shabby being the operative word) but is now even shabbier after a piece of the frame on the lower left-hand side fell out a few months ago. I suppose I could mend it with suitable glue – I tell myself the missing piece simply adds to the olde worlde appearance.

The impulse buy – the expensive item you come home with when you actually intended to pick up a packet of pasta, a jar of anchovies and some tinned tomatoes – is an institution in our shopping culture. ‘I just bought it on impulse’, we say, or ‘I was just passing and I saw it and I had to have it’.

Impulse purchases are unplanned purchases. They often occur at cash registers where goods are displayed so as to tempt shoppers as they leave the store. You’re most vulnerable to an unwise impulse buy when you’re tired, hungry, or feeling low.

The irony of the impulse buy is the contrast between the buyer’s lack of conscious planning and the lengths that stores go to in preparing their ambush. About 60 per cent of what we buy is unplanned, and store displays are carefully designed and positioned to tempt us to reach for our wallets or add an extra item to our trolleys on the spur of the moment.

The internet is rife with its own triggers for impulse buying. Anonymity, easy use of credit cards, navigational software and a seemingly infinite number of choices make the internet an ideal environment for encouraging us to buy on impulse.

Impulse buys aren't all the same

The difference between an impulse buy and something you buy intuitively – something that you really do need and want – isn’t always obvious. In fact, they can sometimes be the same thing – it depends on the reasons behind the purchase.

Often when we buy things suddenly, we’ve actually been planning the purchase for a long time. One evening my brother-in-law Robert came home with a shivery little ginger-coloured spaniel. He’d supposedly bought the pup ‘on impulse’, but his two young daughters had been nagging him to get them a puppy for over a year. Perhaps Robert hadn’t planned to buy the puppy – but his unconscious mind had.

On the other hand, if you’re feeling low and find yourself poised to purchase some overpriced video game based on a blockbuster that you enjoyed at the cinema, although you have no idea whether the game itself is any good, this is less likely to be the result of intuition.

So how do you distinguish between a good impulse buy and an unwise one? Here are some tips to keep you on track.

1. Have a budget in place. A budget with allocated spending for different categories gives you a structure that helps you to identify whether you can afford the item that’s clamouring for your attention.

2. Start a Priority List. A Priority List, which I describe in detail in my book The Inspired Shopper, makes a great supplement to a budget. It’s basically a list of all the things you want and need. Prepare this list slowly and mindfully, noting how you feel as you write an item down. Do you really need the item or not? Could you repurpose something instead?

If an item you get the urge to buy on impulse is on your Priority List, it may be something you want and need. But you still need to ‘check in’ at the time to ensure that it feels right to buy it.

3. Get in touch how are you’re feeling. There are many emotions that can tip us over into wanting to buy. Sometimes the item may be directly related to how you’re feeling (a chocolate bar when you’re hungry) or sometimes it’s just that you’re desperate to buy something – anything – and the item conveniently presents itself in front of you! Common feelings that can set off the urge to buy are sadness, disappointment, anger, fatigue, hunger – but even positive emotions like joy, triumph and relief can lead us to buy.

4. Tap into your intuition. There is another layer of experience deeper than emotions – your intuition. It’s always there, regardless of how you’re feeling. Once you’ve worked out how your intuition responds in shopping situations, you can always rely on it. Start to experiment with it in simple scenarios, like choosing the best bunch of celery, and go from there.

5. Let go of the item. Letting go of an item before you decide whether to buy it – a process I call relinquishing – is very similar to a cooling-off period. But it doesn’t rely on moving physically away from the item, or waiting a long time before making a decision. What’s important with relinquishing is that you actually let go of the item mentally. You decide that you won’t buy it, place it back of the shelf or rack, and then you stop to listen to how your intuition responds. Does it feel genuinely wrong to leave the item behind? Or is there a sense of relief?

The impulse buy and your Priority List

An impulse buy that your unconscious has been planning for a while may sometimes be a good thing. Deliberately hunting out a new wool wrap, kitchen trolley or pair of summer sandals can lead to a long, fruitless and debilitating search; when you most feel you need something, you often can’t find it.

The Priority List lets your unconscious do the searching for you. When you have an idea of all the things you need, you can be proactive without really trying because your unconscious mind will be on the lookout for those items. When the right item appears, you’ve checked out the specifications, the price is right and you’re ready to buy, snap it up.

However, in the case of any significant purchase, you’ll need to carry out research before you buy. You can delay what would otherwise have been an impulse purchase by researching the item once you’ve found it.

Should you buy something on impulse if it’s not already on your Priority List? Ultimately you make the rules – how much structure you need depends on how prone you are to overspending, and how confident you are that you can stick to your budget.

The more you practise, the better you’ll be at distinguishing between intuitive and purely emotional shopping desires. It’s better to err on the side of caution if you’re unsure –you can always put something on your Priority List once you find it, and go back and buy it when you’ve had time to decide whether it will genuinely enhance your life.

Until next time!



If you enjoyed this post, you might like How to Stay Calm When Shopping Online!

Downsizing, going frugal, cutting spending – everyone’s doing it these days. It’s part of a huge wave of consumer empowerment that the mainstream media seems incapable of grasping, instead simply complaining that ‘retail spending is down’.

Partly as a response to the GFC, the frugal movement ties in beautifully with another trend – people who, empowered by social media, are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and the amount of goods going to landfill while ceasing to purchase goods that exploit others.

Many of the frugal are reformed overspenders and shopping addicts who took control and are now paying back debt and learning to live richly on a much smaller (and saner) budget.

But I’m not one of those people. It took me ages to figure out that in fact I have the opposite problem. I’m not a reformed overspender. I’m a reformed underspender.

Before I became an underspender I was a spendthrift. For most of my twenties I simply spent everything I earned. But even then I wasn’t extravagant; I didn’t even have a credit card (come to think of it, I’ve never had a credit card, apart from a temporary one for an overseas trip; I now have a debit card). Nor was I particularly into shopping, or good at it. I just never saved anything because I didn’t realise I could.

When I started stingeing, I overdid it. It was a correction that went too far. I couldn’t tell the difference between necessary and unnecessary spending. For example, for about four years I went without a car; yet during that time I wouldn’t spend money on taxis to get home from a party, even though I was saving hundreds of dollars a year in car expenses.

I wrote my book, The Inspired Shopper, as an attempt to work out how to spend money wisely and how to buy the things I really needed.

The book has helped me to do those things, and most of things I buy these days are right for me. I imagine it would also be of use to reformed overspenders who want to spend in moderation.

But it doesn’t entirely take away the anxiety about spending. It just means that most of the time I don’t have to act on it (or fail to act because of it). Fear of spending money runs deep. It’s a basic distrust in the process of life. Giving money away to get something in return requires a degree of trust – that the object is not faulty, that it will work for a reasonable amount of time, that you’re not just throwing money away.

Usually I think I’ve worked through this. And then one bad buy and bang! I’m back to underspending hell again.

The lure of underspending 

The extreme end of the frugal movement is compacting. Compacters commit to buying no new non-perishable goods, apart from necessities such as underwear and health and safety items, for a year. They can buy secondhand goods, barter, and receive gifts. Compacting seems to be less popular now, but the Fashion Challenge has taken over where compacting left off.

In some ways the Fashion Challenge is more extreme than compacting. For a year you commit to not buying any clothes at all, including underwear, socks, material for making things, or secondhand goods. You can swap clothes with others but you can’t receive clothes or undies as gifts. When I’m in underspending mode, the Fashion Challenge actually sounds quite tempting. No difficult decisions to make!

It’s not that I don’t enjoy shopping these days. I love it. I just don’t love spending. They’re not the same thing.

Underspending is actually quite painful. It can lead to compulsive buying because you end up holding out too long for something you really need. You may hurriedly buy something without checking that it has all the features that you require because you’re so desperate to purchase a necessity.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns has found that when we have money in our bank accounts (or pockets) it means more to us because it offers unlimited possibilities. We don’t have to commit to spending it on one thing. Twenty thousand dollars could fund an indulgent trip to Paris that includes sampling a series of five-star Michelin restaurants, go towards a down payment on an apartment, or pay for one year of a law course.

When you spend that money, it’s gone. Committing to one or more things means that all the other possibilities fall away. If you’ve been saving for a while, it may become difficult to let a large slice of money go.

Frugality doesn’t mean a miserly approach to life. Most people who write about budgeting recommend building small treats into the process. And many frugal people make it their policy to buy quality goods when they do buy. Ethical purchases make even more sense in this context. Of course, for many people frugality isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.

The habit of saving

Even if you don’t come from a history of underspending (and I understand that in our consumer society most of us don’t), is it possible to become addicted to frugality so that we become afraid to spend? Could too much compacting be bad for you? Or, once you’ve curbed the overspending, is it relatively simple to get the balance right without too much pain?

I would love to hear from readers about this. How do you know when to save and when to spend? How do you treat yourself? Is it possible to get addicted to saving? Is it hard to spend money when you’ve been saving too long? How do you get the balance right?

Until next time!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like In with the Old and Out with the New - Shopping and the Search for Perfection.
                                                                                                                                                               

When I joined Tweetdeck, I set it up to search for tweets on the topic of retail. Now I’m bombarded with tweets about retail every few seconds. A huge proportion of these tweets consist of either ‘I need retail therapy’ or ‘I love retail therapy’.

There is often a hidden logic in our reasons for seeking retail therapy. Perhaps we feel we deserve a treat, or something bad has happened that we need to process. Yet we don’t usually get what we really need when we use shopping to mediate our emotions. On the contrary, the short-term high from the hit of dopamine when we buy can lead to long-term buyer’s remorse and a serious debt problem.

It’s still important to reward and treat ourselves sometimes. Perhaps you’ve done a solid stretch of work and need time out. Perhaps you’re a bit down and need a pick-me-up. Perhaps you’re just feeling needy or bored.

Below are some tips for ‘rewards’ and treats that are either cheap or free. Some of them are absurdly simple, but they may be hard to put into practice. Society not only gives us permission to shop, but presents it as a virtue. Governments panic when consumers stop buying. After 9/11, George Bush told Americans that shopping was a patriotic act! Self-care and nurturing don’t make the big corporations any money. It can feel a bit self-indulgent to look after yourself, while hitting the streets and scoring a bargain feels more like an achievement. Giving yourself permission for non-retail treats and rewards is the first step in combating the need for retail therapy. Here are some options.

* If it’s a nice day, grab a rug, a water bottle, a hat and a good book or newspaper and head down to the nearest park. Sit yourself under a friendly oak and wile away an hour communing with nature and your favourite author. Or simply set yourself up in the backyard on a sun lounge with your iPod and a good book.

* Schedule some serious down time. (This will be hard if you’re a workaholic or have kids, but if you can arrange it with your spouse it’s a great way to regenerate your batteries.) Allot yourself a set amount of time on the couch. Set up your supplies (hot drink, healthy snack, books and newspapers) or simply have a nap. Alternatively, retreat to bed with said supplies. A ‘doona day’ (or half a day) may sound lazy but can be incredibly replenishing.

* Stake out a public art gallery holding a free exhibition in a neighbouring or rural town, pack a lunch and head on down – make a day of it.

* Find out from the internet or your local paper if there are free or very cheap architectural/historical tours in your area. Profit-making tours are expensive but sometimes local history societies hold walking tours for as little as a $2 donation.

* Enjoy a relaxing bath, complete with bath salts, essential oils and gentle music.

* Give yourself a pedicure, including a foot soak, in front of your favourite TV program.

* Plan a low-cost ‘date’ with your spouse or partner. Plan a frugal meal, buy some cleanskin wine and candles and choose some romantic music. Or simply go for a stroll along the beach or a river followed by a coffee.

* Visit a flea market and allocate yourself a small amount of spending money. Tramp around and soak up the atmosphere.

* If you’re into gardening or just like viewing gorgeous gardens, visit a garden show – these vary in price but can often be quite cheap. Find out if your local area has any open garden schemes, with owners of beautiful gardens opening them to the public for a small entry fee.

* Arrange to stay with a friend in another state, town or region.

* Arrange to have a Skype or phone chat with an out-of-town pal that you haven’t heard from for a while.

* Take advantage of any free summer concerts held by your local council.

* Schedule some laughter time. Hire a stack of comedy DVDs or Blu-rays. Choose shows and movies that you can rely on to make you laugh. Alternatively, borrow comedy DVDs from your friends. (Note: you don’t have to wait to the weekend to do this; it's often cheaper to hire DVDs during the week anyway.)

* Schedule some crying time. Borrow DVDs or Blu-rays that you know will give you the chance for a good bawl.

* Schedule some time to bake one of your favourite dishes. When I was a kid we didn’t make biscuits (cookies) much, we made slices – hedgehog, brownies, coconut ice, and my personal favourite, the three-layered caramel slice. If you’re trying to steer clear of sugar, bake a favourite savoury dish or experiment with Italian, Thai, Indian or Mexican food.

* Get some pet therapy. If you don’t have your own dog, borrow a friend or relative’s dog and take them to the local dog park. Not only will you get lots of doggie energy and probably enjoy some friendly chats, but you’ll earn the unconditional love of a faithful friend. Or connect with the local wildlife: a friend of mine lives opposite a park with a pond, and on most days he finds time to check in with the duck family who live there.

* Put some music on and dance around your lounge room.

* Plan a cheap beauty therapy afternoon with your pals. Make beauty masks from common ingredients, and/or dye your hair and paint your nails.

If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy Are Any of These Negative Beliefs about Money Holding You Back?


Until next time!

Finding something wonderful in an op shop or thrift store can feel a bit magical. This is when serendipity happens – you’re pottering around the store or walking past a shop window and suddenly you spot a special item that seems to have been waiting for you to arrive and claim it as your own. But how do you know it’s a genuine bargain and not just a cheap piece of junk that will clutter up your house and give you a short-term dose of retail therapy?

A bargain is something that feels right at a gut level – even if your emotions and rational mind aren’t quite sure – doesn’t cost a lot of money and will enhance your life in some way. It doesn’t have to be something worth a lot of money that you pick up for a song, although it can be.

This sense of rightness isn’t just about the item itself. It’s about the way it ends up working with its adoptive environment to produce a kind of alchemy that transforms the environment, even if that transformation is subtle. Together the item and its environment become more than the sum of their parts. There’s an uncanny fit between them.

When I saw the framed print above in the window of a Salvos store in the prosperous eastern suburb of Camberwell a few weekends ago I was a bit dubious. Sitting in the midst of a window display featuring the usual assortment of stilettos, hats and semi-formal dresses in eye-catching colours, it looked like just another example of late nineties or early noughties kitsch. Which essentially it was.

Price-wise it wasn’t a huge bargain. It was $25, half the original price of $50, which I discovered when I went into the store to have a closer look at it and saw the original label on the back (impossible to say if this was the original price or an earlier Salvos price).

The piece was essentially tacksville. Yet something about the boldness of the colours and the cartoonishness of the design screamed ‘buy me’. So I did, unable to think of where I would put it.

Given that it was probably over ten years old it was in quite good condition. The stained wooden frame, possibly pine, had very few marks or nicks. The picture had a twin, with an almost identical print, displayed in similar fashion in the other shop window. Its condition was clearly inferior, with significant scratches on the frame and a few marks on the glass. It didn’t take much willpower to decide to leave the companion behind.

When I come home with this kind of item – something I’ve pounced on without much pre-planning – I sometimes engage in a bizarre ritual that would look quite mad to an observer. I walk around the house carrying the item and saying to to myself ‘where does this go?’ If I try to be too rational about the answer to this question, the process doesn’t work.

I finally settled on my office, easily the most boring room in the house and boringly festooned with testaments to my achievements. Did I really have to keep reminding myself and anyone else who walked in that I have a Masters degree? I think it’s sunk in by now. Same with the framed arts degree. Both were relegated to storage and this little beauty hung up instead.

And it has been a bit transformational. It now takes pride of place on a large patch of wall that is to the left of, and above, my desk. Because of the expanse of wall around it, the fact that the picture is square and the frame is dark and plain, the placement of the picture suggests a window through which you see the oversized flowers. The striking colours are the first thing the eye notices when you walk into the room, instead of the files, papers, books and office paraphernalia that would otherwise dominate. Because it’s just to the left of my computer I can see it out of the corner of my eye and glance at it any time. I like to think that when I'm writing, its fiery colours stoke my imagination.

Already I’ve grown incredibly fond of this picture, yet like many of my inspired finds it’s certainly not what I would have envisaged. Now I can't imagine life without it!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Sole mates, or a Gift That Suits Me Down to the Ground.

Until next time!

I adore shopping. It’s something I’ve taught myself to do and I’m not ashamed to say I’ve become good at it. But these days whenever I enter yet another gleaming retail temple, I’m always painfully aware of the labour that’s gone into creating the goods that are now presented in upmarket and sometimes opulent splendour for my delectation. There’s always another setting that is not seen, but that I think about.

This is what struck me most about Seduction in the City, a wonderful documentary screened on SBS, a government-funded Australian TV channel, last Wednesday night. It was a fascinating program about the birth of the modern department store. Many innovations that we take for granted today are incremental. But if the show is to be believed, the entire department store concept as we experience it today seems to have been dreamed up by a visionary marketer, the French entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut.

Boucicaut owned one of the world’s first department stores, Le Bon Marche. It started off as a dry goods store in 1838 but after 1852 Boucicaut began to innovate, and he was spurred onto greater things by the World Fair that was hosted by Paris in 1855. The innovations he pioneered, and that we now can’t imagine life without, include price tags, the ability to return goods, on-site toilets, lifts, home delivery, sales, store catalogues, relying on high turnover to sell goods with a low mark-up, and the very idea of browsing. According to academic Sally Feldman, ‘The freedom to wander and gaze without having to buy ... was the most arresting feature of the very first department store’. And this, of course, is what still seduces us today.

Most important of all, Boucicaut decided that he was not just selling individual goods, but a lifestyle. Boucicaut’s consumer paradise offered customers more than the satisfaction of material needs. He was selling consumer desire itself.

Boucicaut was decades ahead of his time, but not just through his concept of an inviting store that would offer a complete experience. He focused on a target market that was ignored and denigrated at the time by a sexism that had permeated every discourse: women. Patriarchy was at its intellectual height and science was ‘proving’ that women were both weak and, to put it plainly, stupid.

Ironically, department stores became portals to female emancipation. They got women out of the house and into the public sphere and gave them objects of desire and aspiration. They created new public spaces that welcomed the presence of women, and developed the idea of consumerism. They gave jobs and a measure of independence to young women who came to capital cities and obtained work as shop assistants.

With half the population radically disempowered, leisure shopping for the first time offered women not only a public space where they were valued, but a dazzling array of consumer choices. Is it any wonder that so many women still adore leisure shopping today?

Continuing the tradition
Australian online shopping is way behind the USA and the UK both in popularity and the choices available to customers. Australian department stores and shopping centres are still undergoing stunning and opulent refurbishments in a bid to immerse customers in a seductive bricks-and-mortar experience. In late 2009 Chadstone Shopping Centre opened a new luxury precinct where shoppers stroll in light-filled splendour past elegant, architected-designed spaces housing international luxury brands. Myer’s flagship department store, a Melbourne institution, unveiled its dramatic architectural redesign (pictured above) in March this year.

I visited Myer’s Mural Hall in the city centre on the weekend. The 1933 hall, restored as part of the recent renovation, is a grand art deco space on the sixth floor of the main building, with a striking double staircase that sweeps down from twin balconies and three huge, ornate chandeliers. A series of murals around the walls that are set in decorative panels celebrate the achievements of women. Given that the murals were painted decades before second wave feminism, they attest to the importance of women as a target market at the time, and the need for the store’s design to contribute to women feeling good about themselves.

Behind the scenes
Watching the beautifully produced Seduction in the City, with its recreations of a nineteenth-century department store complete with quaint rows of wooden drawers to hold the stock, and elegant ladies in Edwardian costume, I kept thinking about the coal mines that powered the industrial revolution, and the horrific conditions in which the goods had no doubt been produced.

I was saddened to think about how little things have changed – we’ve simply exported the dark satanic mills to China. Indeed the show’s director, Sally Aitken, has written:

Many a time I have marvelled at the ingenuity and the tenacity of the early department store retailers. And many other times I’ve been appalled – their cunning ploys have left us the legacy of a society beset with instant gratification, debt, throwaway goods and endless fashion.

I still get seduced by the gleaming retail temples I visit, although increasingly less so. Simultaneously appalled and enthralled, I keep reminding myself that new models of making, buying and selling are now being developed that are in contrast with this model of consumerism, which is arguably outdated. We just don’t hear about these new models in the mainstream media – a subject for a future blog entry?

The final instalment of Seduction in the City will screen in Melbourne this Wednesday at 8.30 pm.

If you liked this blog entry you might enjoy Last Days of a Dying Behemoth.

The hardest thing about writing this blog is not wanting to sound like a breathless, retail-obsessed compulsive shopper. I think anyone who enjoys leisure shopping is in danger of exhibiting compulsive shopping behaviour at different times, and I'm always on the lookout for the telltale signs. With that caveat, I'll now detail the second part of my most recent shopping trip.

I went to my local shopping mall mainly to buy a present for a friend, but I also wanted to check out the clothes shops. This time of year is great for sales. There is Boxing Day and the days following, when great bargains can be had, and then a period when I find leisure shopping quite depressing – the goods have been picked through, the salespeople are dispirited and it all seems quite tired. By mid-January, however, there are often new things on sale. Having had a break since my post-Christmas hunt and gather, I thought it was time to see if there were any new bargains to be had – I still had some summer clothes items on my priority list, a list I keep and update constantly to ensure that I buy only the things I want and need.

Sure enough, I found a pair of cargo pants for $36 – the right colour and style, and 20 per cent off the original price. I had been waiting for this clothes item for a while, and it was gratifying to finally find what I was after ('Waiting' is one of the techniques I recommend in my book).

I did my usual Inspired Shopping practice of relinquishing (very easy to do in a changeroom – I relinquish by starting to put the favoured item back on the clothes hanger, and if my intuition alarm goes off, decide to take it). I then decided to pop into a very fashionable clothes chain with a young image.

This store is very concerned with the latest trends and so throws clothes out that aren't selling well at huge discounts, often as much as 70 per cent. I found a black, sleeveless top with a pretty lacy panel at the neck for what I assumed was $8, down from $29.95 (the sale sticker had been ripped off, but other similar tops on the rack were $8 down from the same price). At such a low price, I didn't feel at all guilty that a sleeveless top wasn't on my priority list – in Melbourne we have many very hot days in summer and I knew I would get a decent amount of wear out of it.

However, the sales assistant seemed confused about the correct price. She wanted to give me 50 per cent off the original price ($14.95) , and I pointed out that there was a red tag attached to the garment that said '70% off', so she gave it to me for $10. Two minutes later I realised that she should have given it to me for $8, the price of similar clothes on the rack. I later calculated that 70 per cent off $29.95 is actually $9, but it looked as if the worker making the pricing decision had opted for the lower price of $8.

Now $2 is a tiny amount of money to quibble about when getting a bargain like this. I was still in the shop when I realised what had happened and debated with myself whether to insist on the greater discount.

It will, of course, be clear to the reader that I am super-sensitive to the tiniest price injustice in a retail store. I am always on the lookout for any attempts to rip customers off, and misleading advertising of prices sends me apoplectic. So this incident was an important experience for me: was I prepared to make a fool of myself for $2? No, I decided, I wasn't. It was clearly an honest mistake, and if I had to argue my case for any length of time, I wouldn't want to show my face in the store again, thereby preventing me from bagging future bargains. I had to give up on $2 as well as my pride and sense of self-righteousness. It hurt just a bit, but I stayed with the hurt and reminded myself what a tiny amount I had lost.

This little incident was an exercise in maturity for me. And please don't think I'm discouraging people from standing up for themselves in retail situations -- I'm not, and my book includes basic information about consumer rights. In fact, if I'd known as I stood at the counter that the correct amount, according to the '70% off' label, was $9, I would have insisted on paying no more than that. But having successfully argued the case for not paying $14.95, and with the transaction completed, I believe I made my decision based on common sense. This is one of the things I love about being an inspired shopper - I learn something new about myself, and get the chance to practise healthy behaviour based on that knowledge, every time I hit the stores!

I took a trip to Ikea yesterday and had an unpleasant retail experience. I don't usually mention specific store names on this blog, because my aim is not to either advertise or bag particular stores. But Ikea is known so widely that the word itself is a shortcut for a particular kind of shopping experience. And I'm not really bagging the store, because it's quite open about its policies regarding staff availability and so on. Most people know the deal when they walk in the door, and the prices are compensation for the lack of individual customer service.

So I'm not even going to describe my experience in any detail, which was as much about the layout of the unfamiliar mall that this Ikea is located in as it was about the store. I will say that surprisingly, and luckily, there were plenty of staff around (probably because it was Christmas) when I needed help.

The main thing I wanted to relate and confess is that I lost my cool. Big time.

I've been writing my book on Inspired Shopping for over a year now. While I feel every emotion under the sun when I'm at the stores, and give myself permission to do this, I realise now that the experiences themselves don't give rise to negative emotions that often. I've become so good at pacing myself and using my intuition when I go to both new and familiar shopping centres, that my shopping experiences are usually quite positive. Well, this one wasn't!

What I discovered about myself in the process was disturbing. When things go wrong, I tend to get upset, in this case with the shopping centre, the store managers and so on. No, I don't shout or stamp my feet, but my impatience is obvious to any staff member I come into contact with. What I've realised from this experience is that my anger can stop me from thinking rationally and finding a way out of my dilemma. In a sense it blinds me. I want the world to change to suit me, to be accommodating. But I need to fall back on my own resources when I come up against a problem, and use my brain to solve it.

This doesn't mean repressing my anger -- I can acknowledge it to myself and then ask myself what I can do to get through my dilemma. This may sound obvious to some, but it's quite a challenge to me. It makes me think of transactional analysis, which holds that we all have within us the subject positions of child, adult and parent. When things go wrong at the shops I move to the position of the child and start treating the shop assistants as parents who have to comfort me and make things okay again. Instead, I need to adopt an adult position, soothing myself and asking for practical help, if need be, without also asking for emotional support.

I'm in a quandary now, because in a way I have to hope that I'll go through this experience again so I can test myself and this time manage the emotions better. But, like everyone else at this time of year, I want shopping to be smooth sailing, so I hope any further 'growth' experiences happen after Christmas!

I wonder if any readers grapple with their child self when they're shopping -- I'd love to hear from you!