Shopping malls attract hundreds of customers each day, because they are close to the city centre, organize different programs for almost every week or month for all ages and tastes, or in Pláza, there is a cinema. All of the shopping centers have some fast food restaurants, clothes stores, like New Yorker, Cosmos, Kik and so on. Besides the shopping, we can find places where we can chill out, like hairdressers, beauty salons, shoe repairers, cloth cleaners, mobile services, even car washes, and so on with the list. Chemistry, gym, post office and adventure center next to each other seems to be a great advantage and the cinemas and the casinos are nice tools for attracting people to these centers, but also, sometimes we should think about the disadvantages, too.

 Personally, I don’t really like to go shopping, the only store I really like is the bookstore. Every time I’m there, I definitely will have at least five minutes to go in and look around.

 These places have a lot of advantages, like closed and climatized area, different shops to fulfill all needs, and also, if you get tired of wandering around all day, you can find a place to sit down and have a nice coffee with your friends or eat a good meal with your family.

 In my opinion it is a great idea to combine free time activity with the daily shopping, when you go to a supermarket to buy food for the dinner, cleaning stuff to do the housework, and then you take a stroll on the long passages, window shopping, laughing with your friends, and we can even buy some clothes for the next party.

 Though, a lot of people like to go there not just during the week, but at the weekends, too, but if we  ask somebody who’s working there, they definitely would say it is a hard work, because they hardly have any time, they have to work a lot each day to get a small amount of money they can run their family on. In the morning the stores open around seven or eight, but they have to be there at least an hour earlier to organize everything before the shop opens.

Not everyone likes crowded places and that’s why a lot of people want to go there just in the hours when there’s nobody else, or they don’t go there at all. Besides, the more people there are, the bigger chance it means for shoplifters, because they can use other people to help them unless they talk to those people or ask them to help. We can easily become victims in these situations, when somebody puts like a pack of chewing gum in our pocket, we don’t notice it. After we go to pay, and when we would like to leave the shop, the alarm system turns on, and we get punishment while the real thief simply walks out next to us, when the alarm is still on.

 In big shopping centers there’s always a rush right before and right after the important celebrations, like Christmas and Easter, when almost everyone celebrates and gives gifts to others. Well, these presents are not always the appropriate ones, that’s why we like to keep the check and then return our gifts and change them for more useful ones. At these times there are huge sales, because the shops have to sell the things they got back or stayed there.

 Ten thousands, or hundred thousands prefer to order and buy from the Internet, as it definitely costs less energy and time, not mentioning that we don’t have to go anywhere, so we can spare fuel and money, too. We get what we wanted in two or three days, maximum a week, and we didn’t even had to go out of our house or stand up out of our comfortable chair. There are many websites selling food, pieces of clothing, household appliances, books, entertaining things, and so on, just to fulfill our needs of every kind and taste. We type in the name of the thing we’re looking for and search through millions of pages and sites, choose the best shop, place, price, quality, even guarantee, and we order whatever we would like to.

 Also, we can organize almost our whole life through websites. We can report the amount of water, gas and electricity we used, together with our tax returns, while we ask for a meeting with our dentist and take part in an auction at the same time.

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.

 Whenever we would like to use the guarantee to get something repaired, we need the thing’s warranty, or unless we won’t be able to hand it in. There are problems which can be solved, but there are cases when we don’t have an other solution, just to boy a new one, because it would cost less time and money for us. While we are in time, according to the warranty, we have three options: usually in the first three workdays if we have any problems with the product, we show the warranty and our newly bought thing, let’s say a camera will be changed for a brand new one from the shelf. In the first one, two or three months our camera will be sent to a head office, where if it’s possible, it gets repaired. With the clothes, we can give them back and choose new things at the price of the piece we had given back previously.

 Despite this, I’ve heard that in America and England they change back almost everything, even meat that was bought a few days ago, but wasn’t good enough for the consumer’s taste. Sometimes I feel that as time goes on, people besides the laziness will have so many idiot ideas, like the one I mentioned before, in connection with the meat.