Shopping Part 1: Women

This is the first in a three part series about shopping.

Many personal finance blogs, particularly those written by women, seem to focus on the grip of consumerism, and in particular the temptation to buy clothes, toiletries and makeup in unreasonable quantities. For example, the charming Shopping Detox (which I read almost every day) follows one woman’s journey to stop excessive spending for an entire year(+), and in the Uniform Project a girl ware the same dress every day for a year.

Why is shopping frequently more of a problem for women than men? And why did I delay writing this post in order to browse the following G-I-R-L-I-E websites?

There is no doubt that all women are different, but I think that women:
1) long for beauty in themselves, and;
2) strive to nurture others

Longing for Beauty

Beauty is not a bad thing in itself, the psalmist longs to gaze on the beauty of the Lord, and God clearly delights in the beauty of his creation in Genesis 1. The problem is that as humans we misuse beauty.

Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor.
Ezekiel 28v17

I can certainly relate to that corrupted wisdom. I know that I want to save for long term goals, but in the changing rooms when something makes me feel beautiful, it can be really difficult to walk out of the shop without it. Mainly because later I will want to do this.

Sometimes it really helps to acknowledge this problem as something good which came from God, which we have twisted into vanity. It is an affliction which we could so easily blame on media or social pressures, but really it is a problem in our own hearts, and focusing on external factors is never going to sort out the real problem. Most of us are just not influential enough to change our entire environment.

The other beauty-related reason that women spend longer shopping is the sheer complexity of clothes. A man buying a t-shirt only needs to fit two dimensions - width and height. For a woman buying a t-shirt, not only does it need to be the right width at the bust, waist and hip, but those widest/narrowest points have to fall at the correct height, giving five variables to get right. And that is just a t-shirt!

Unfortunately, the extra time women spend fighting to find things that fit means that they have greater sunk costs, so when women find something, anything, that fits, they are likely to buy it in triumph, until they get home to realise they have three grey skirts already.

If you want to improve the nature of your beauty shopping, recognising the “female” attitudes which trigger a spending spree are key. For the first time ever, I recently managed to buy a beautiful dress (which I didn’t really need) in a really good frame of mind. I could afford it, and I was so grateful to God that it was something so pretty, it felt like a real celebration of the good things He has given me. In contrast, I have bought plenty of other items purely for vanity’s sake, thinking only about glorifying myself. Even more depressing are the purchases to ‘cheer myself up’, but we’ll get onto those later in this series.

Nurturing others

In a survey conducted by Professor Karen J. Pine, many women said they go on a spending spree to treat others (75%) or to impress others (52%), despite over a third admitting that they had spend more than they could afford in the last week alone! You can see it in they way that women decorate homes and fuss over crockery where men couldn’t care less; making things nice for the people around us is important.

Much as it is wonderful to take care of others, most of the time your genuine attentive presence is far more valuable than decoration. If people really are simply after your cooking and cleaning skills, may I suggest you find other people to spend time with? Can you visualise what your dad/partner/brother would do if he was also walking past that display of scented candles? Hmm, yes I thought so. Put it back.