Shopping / shops
Shopping / shops
consumer society
buying on credit/with credit cards/on the Internet
shopping tourism
Our society is growing bigger and bigger each moment, and we all have our personal needs, like food, clothes,
places to live, and of course water, electricity and other things. We get them by shopping. We can go to shopping
centers or small shops, or we can decide to order something to our house, and there are people whose job is to
deliver it.
Years ago, there were smart men in the industry, who realized that people buy what they need in the best quality
they can afford. But what if their things have long lifetimes. Here came the planned obsolescence. Its basic idea
is to influence the people to buy a little better, a little more expensive things a little sooner than they actually
need, just to keep the industry working. They can do it in two ways: the first is that they make their products’
lifetimes shorter, but just a little bit longer than their guarantees, so they buy new things when some single, little
tricks would solve the whole problem, like taking out a microchip. The other way is to find out what the
customer would like. They make lots of advertisements, designs, which look better and cooler, than the older
ones, and they take action and sale signs out in their windows as bait for the people.
Even the product’s place on the shelf influences a single person in the shop: if something is in the height of our
eyes, we notice it sooner and think that it’s somehow better than the one on the bottom of the shelf, which may
be a bit cheaper, and sometimes better.
But in these times, we also have to think about the rate of the price and the value. There might be some famous
brands which are very expensive, but may not know as much or last as long as a bit cheaper and less known
brand. And also, factories try to compete with each other, and the smaller ones are making thing with the bigger
ones’ logos. It is called forgery. There are some ways to find out, which is the original, because sometimes the
difference can be very obvious, but sometimes it’s very hard to distinguish them.
And there are the sales, which attract many people to the shops. You’d rather go into a shop which says on its
windows that you can buy a sweater for 5 dollars, which would originally cost 10 dollars, than into a shop which
offers thing for their original price. But there are even cases, when the original price is what they write on the
price tag, as the sale price, and the price they write as the original is just for showing people that, now it’s really
worth buying it.
Another problem of the sales it about the different kitchen, clothing and other sets. You may want to buy a pair of
jeans, but if you go to the shop, you find a shirt which matches it perfectly, of in the window, you see a nice
blouse with a jacket, and as you go in, you find out that it’s not a set, you have to buy them separately. The third,
but probably not last problem is the pay one and take two, or maybe pay for two and take three sales. This way
you can also be fooled. Just see for an example that you would like to eat some grapes, but as you go inside the
shop, you see that you can get three boxes of grapes at the price of two boxes. In the beginning, you wanted to
eat just some, and decided to buy a box, but at the end, you end up buying two, taking three and throwing all
away to the garbage, because you couldn’t eat all, just a half box, and all the rest got rotten. The sale sounds
nice, but the results are not that great.
Let’s talk about the wrapping. It can be a good feeling to see cute children playing happily on the boxes of the
toys, but does your child really need that expensive thing which would end up in the garbage, next to the grapes?
Sometimes just the wrapping inspires us to buy things, because it looks good, or you may think that yes, one day
you may need it for something, or even the box can send messages to your brain „buy me, buy me”.
These things are all the cause why people borrow a lot of money for gifts around Easter, Christmas and other
holidays. If we thing it over again, that did we or the people whom we gave the thing really needed this or that,
I’m sure we would find some things that were not so necessary to be bought.
I buy so many things on the Internet, for an example from e-Bay. E-Bay is an American multinational
corporation and e-commerce company. On their websites you can buy things from all over the world. And the
best is it’s cheap and safe. For example I ordered headset to my mobile phone several times from China. It was
perfect and its price with shipping was a fraction of the orginal price. I honestly believe that online shopping is a
very comfortable and brilliant.
When I go shopping I prefer to buy with my credit card, because I don’t need a lot of money in my wallet. What
I just need a small and slim card.
After Hungary’s accession to the EU shopping tourism has increased. The Hungarians visit the neighbouring
countries mainly to buy consumer goods but the top seller is fuel from Slovakia, Romania, and the Ukraine.
Austria has been mainly the destination to buy quality clothes and electronic articles.
Shopping tourism causes a serious loss to Hungarian economy in taxes and by avoiding to buy more expensive
Hungarian products. In Austria a Hungarian tourist leaves an average of 210 euros when shopping.
