Discount Madness

The scene: I walk into a mall in the midst of post-Christmas discount madness. The jeans are buy one, get one half-off, and I think, “Whoa, that’s such a good deal. I’m practically stealing them.” So I buy two pairs, even though I have six very similar pairs of pants at home. But hey, I came out on top, right?

Wrong, because somewhere between closeout prices and BOGO sales, I have lost my ability to say “no.”

Even though I have spent my life shopping at the back of the stores and rummaging through discount bins, I feel like I constantly waste money on clothes. I’m so obsessed with getting things cheap that I often end up buying a lot of cheap things that I don’t need.

Apparently this pandemic isn’t just affecting me. In November the American Research Group, Inc., reported that 50 percent of respondents wouldn’t buy a gift for the full price, but instead would wait for the sales. The worsening economy is breeding a whole new generation of discount hunters, and to these newly christened shoppers I say, buyer beware: You don’t always save by shopping on sale.

The cult of bargain shopping teaches us to consider price first and everything else – from sizing and design to quality and durability – second. Often it coerces us into purchasing terrible clothes that we’ll spend more money replacing than we would have if we had just gotten something a little more expensive in the first place.

If I traded any three of the badly made tops I bought on impulse after Christmas, I could have had something nice. So how much did I really save?

I think being obsessed with bargains has led me to lose sight of the value of money. I have no sense of how much a nice dress would be worth to me, because I always opt instead for the cheap one that isn’t so bad. Somewhere along the line I missed the memo about how you can save up to buy the nice things that you really want. Instead, I always seem to blow all of my savings on the first moderately good-looking thing that comes with a red tag.

More than that, bargain hunting has blinded me to the real question that should be at the heart of any shopping trip: What do I really need? I have fooled myself into thinking that if something is cheap I should just get it, regardless of how many other similar sweaters I have or how I really don’t care for the pattern. As a result, I have half a closet full of clothes that I’m not particularly in love with and I still find myself feeling like I have nothing to wear.

The fact of the matter is that you are not saving money if you didn’t need to buy that second pair of shoes in the first place. With the economy continuing to plunge we could all stand to spend more time evaluating what we really need and less time scrambling for discount prices.