Shopping

 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 put action and sale signs out in their windows as bails 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 to 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 bee 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 out 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.

 Some people may think that if they buy their things on the internet, they can get them cheaper. But what about the money that the post office and the wrapping costs? This way we spent almost the same amount of money. Sometimes we pay a little less, sometimes a little more, but if we count after it, we usually got similar prices. And if we go to the shop, we get the things that time, while if we order something, we have to wait a few days, until it gets delivered.

Another thing that is important to mention is the multilevel marketing, or MLM. This is based on the number of one’s acquaintances and their influence on them. Somebody registers into the system, and in member shops they get special sales. As time goes, these people can get bigger sales, as they try to attract more people. Basically, they are advertising this system and these shops. Their friends, whose are interested in this business, join the group, too, this way they attract more and more people there. This is how these groups and shops get much more consumers, with free advertising. Your friends’ opinion influences you better, than a piece of paper you see on a wall, doesn’t it?

 Of course, I have heard that people try to stop these stupid ideas and I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but somewhere a law had been made which said that people can’t have money after the others they invited buy something from the list of the cooperating companies.