Audience Analysis: My intended audience is a group of middle-aged women who has a passion for shopping, particularly for women’s clothes and accessories. I chose this age group because by their late 20s, more or less of these women, either married or not, should already have experiences in the past in managing, or trying to manage, their money in shopping. Because my audiences are people who are much older than I am, I will have quite a hard time persuading them to start practicing my way of managing money in relation to shopping, so my experience alone isn’t a good enough supporting evidence.
How do shopaholics define adrenaline rush? The answer is very simple. Picture yourself inside a fitting room at a boutique store, squeezing in the drop-dead gorgeous dress you picked out right after the moment you spot it. Then you close your eyes and say: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Slowly, you open your eyes, and you are astonished. The mirror tells you that you will be the center of attention at the party tonight – the party that will be jam-packed with the hottest designers in town and the most coveted models around the world; how perfect can it be? While you are getting all agitated with your own imagination, you don’t take much notice of the price tag that was printed USD 999.99 on it. You swap your credit card without much hesitation, since you’re going to pay the amount back by the end of the year anyway. Now I would like to ask one simple question: What if this happens once in every month for a year?
The sum of the expenses per month will be equal to 12 times USD 999.99, and I dare not say the total number of digits the result has. If you think again, the large amount of money could have been used for buying necessary groceries, for paying electricity bills, and also for providing your children, if any. This is why it’s so important to keep track of your expenses on a regular basis. This is also why, in my opinion, shopaholics like you and me should record the monthly transactions of our expenses in shopping for clothes and accessories so that we can practice a better financial management and set aside that money for better use, and also more importantly, to gain control of our temptations to avoid wasting money on the things we end up not liking that much.
As I have mentioned earlier, you could have spent the amount of 12 times USD 999.99 for the things you need more than dresses that you are only going to use for one night. Keeping records of your personal expenditures per month will help you reveal your spending “weak spots”, as recognizing patterns of impulsive purchases can help you avoid the reoccurrence (CIGNA Behavioral Health, 2003). For those of you who already have a family, I thought that giving a little information about my mother’s method of financial management from our interview early this month (Ng, personal communication, April 2007) can be very useful.
As a parent of three children, of whom I am the only daughter by the way, and also as a loyal shopper, mother has an efficient way to draw out the plans for the family’s needs and her own very clearly. She keeps three individual journals for us children respectively, recording every Chinese herb and other essential food supplements that she has bought for us on the journals. She has also set a specific amount of budget for each of our three housemaid monthly wages, and also for the amount she allows herself to spend within two months. For her personal spending, she keeps those transactions she made within the two months in another separate journal of her own. This way, she’s able to reflect her own spending with her own budget, and if she thinks she has spent enough for her own needs, she would use the rest of the budget to buy groceries to provide the family.
From the example I have given, keeping an organized plan for your financial life and also a budget for ourselves and for others has proven to be a benefit. Following a budget is not a matter of pinching pennies. It's just deciding exactly where those pennies should go and following your plan (“Shopaholic?”, 2007). Also, if you reduce your clutter, organize your stuff, and create routines, your stress levels will go down immensely (DePaz, 2006).
Now that you know how record keeping can help in managing your life financially, I shall explain how it can also help in developing abstinence from spending money quickly and freely. Although I am a little young, I know for sure that all female shoppers have the same attitude towards shopping as opposed to male shoppers. Men usually would stick to their mission, and women would expand their mission, but not abandoning them (Maguire, 2006). Men generally do a lot of research first before buying an item, whereas women would not be as interested in the details at first and explore what other items are there in the store (Maguire, par. 16). Based on my own experience, I will have to agree with Maguire’s beliefs of women’s attitudes towards shopping.
During the first three months when I first stepped into
Besides that, I have also done a lot more online shopping than before. Online shopping is beneficial in such a way that I can compare prices of the same item from different stores so that I can get the best deal (Germain, p. 3). Also, usually online stores require a shopper to create an account for setting up something called an “order history” that records all of your past transactions. Since online stores have provided me this record-keeping service, I won’t have to keep another journal for that use like what my mother does.
Nevertheless, mother also has her own way to control ourselves when shopping. Until she married father, she had this principle that I can briefly describe as “don’t need, don’t buy”. As a teenager, she was forced to buy only the things she needed as opposed to the things she wanted. However, getting married to a wealthy man didn’t make her spend all the money within a flash of light. Instead, she incorporated the principle of “don’t need, don’t buy” that has already been rooted on the ground of her beliefs, along with her desire as a child back then to spend some of her money on the pretty clothes and shoes she longed for, and made a whole new idea of buying both what she needs and also what she wants.
Take the example of her thoughts when deciding whether or not I should buy my colored toric lenses. Toric lenses are specially made according to the degrees of our eyes, but are available in both transparent lenses and also in colored ones. Back then, if it was my mother who had to enhance her vision, grandmother could have bought her a pair of spectacles, considering that she must only buy what was needed. However, colored toric lenses are worth the amount so that we can see more clearly. Moreover, they are made in color so that our eyes can look more dramatic. Since it was both needed and wanted, mother almost immediately agree with me on purchasing the lenses.
Based on the examples I have mentioned, being aware of how much we have spent can improve our abstinence from shopping compulsively. It means going cold turkey on the credit card purchases, which is the most difficult step for many people to take (“Shopaholic?”, 2007). However, this difficulty is made simpler by keeping records of transactions, most preferably collecting them at the end of each month as a routine. This way, you won't be constantly thinking that you thought you had something you had to do - you will know what you have to do (DePaz, 2006).
However, what use is a transaction record anyway if I’m already able to control my money, you may ask. I understand that some of you shoppers who have lived for more than 20 years from now have found other ways to shop sensibly. You may have practiced safekeeping your credit cards once in a while, handed them temporarily to a trusted friend, or limited yourself to only one or two all-purpose cards (CIGNA Behavioral Health, 2003). Nevertheless, keeping each and every record gives you a written document that you can review whenever you go for a shopping spree. It not only constantly reminds you how much you have spent for the month; it also exercises our mind to differentiate between our needs and our wants. For example, those of you who have never practiced record-keeping before, you would probably swap your credit card carelessly right after you saw that gorgeous dress you’re going to wear to the A-list party. When you said you need that dress, did you mean you went to the mall to look for a piece of clothing to wear for the event, or did you see the dress first, and then decide to go to the party after that? If your answer is the second option and at that time you don’t have your transaction record with you (which reminds you how much you have spent), you might actually think that you want it so much that you will be wearing it often, since you “need” it and want it so badly. After a few months of the moment you swap your card for that dress, you realized that you need to find a supportive reason to give that dress away to your sister. How ironic is that?
Given the examples I acknowledged above, I would like to stress my opinion once more on the huge advantage of record keeping your monthly expenditures in your life financially. As loyal shopaholics, we should not only have the skills in predicting fashion trends and good sense of style, but also understand how we can manage our money wisely so as to avoid wasting our money on the things we won’t like for long and also to spend that money for better use instead. Who knows when you will spot the latest lovely model of Gucci’s handbag, but end up realizing that you don’t have enough money to purchase it!
References
CIGNA Behavioral Health (2003). Overcoming Shopaholism. Retrieved March 2007 from http://apps.cignabehavioral.com/web/basicsite/consumer/educationAndResourceCenter/articleLibrary/other_addictions12.pdf.
DePaz, L. (2006). Clutter = Stress. Common Connections: The Health Connection. Retrieved 19 April 2007 from http://www.commonconnections.com/health/Stress&Clutter.html.
Germain, J. (2005, November 1). Attention Internet Shoppers: The Web’s Best Product-Comparison Sites. NewsFactor.com: E-commerce/ Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=112007GNGX28&page=3.
Maguire, J. (2006, January 25). Men, Women, and Shopping Online.
SmallBusinessComputing.com: Online Marketing. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/emarketing/article.php/3579771.
Ng, M. (mother). Personal Communication. Conducted on March 2007.
StanCorp Financial Group, Inc (2007). “Shopaholic?” TheStandard. Retrieved April 19, 2007 from http://www.standard.com/pensions/psc/newsarchive.html.
Score: 96/100
Stacia,
I am glad you found a topic that you enjoyed writing about. In this paper, you used an effective mixture of published sources, interview material, and personal experience, and together those sources of information not only support your argument but make you seem credible as well.
I have enjoyed reading your papers this semester, including your extra-credit paper. As I have told you before, you have a lively writing style and a lively imagination, and that’s great. As you take other courses where writing is required, you may have some teachers who prefer a more controlled writing style with less personality injected, and in those cases you should definitely adapt your writing to suit those teachers’ requirements and preferences. (It’s always helpful to practice different types of writing, anyway.) However, I think most teachers appreciate some personality and uniqueness in papers that they read, so I hope you are able to adapt your style to different writing situations you may face in the future.
The other thing I hope is that you are able to follow your own advice and control your spending. Not only will your mother appreciate that, but if you get married someday, I’m sure your husband will appreciate it, too! For now, good luck with your blog, and have a nice summer.
