Skip to main content

More on How to Budget - Fight Against Impulse Buying

  



  The BBC has latched onto something my mother told me c1981:
  Shops try to inveigle you into impulse buying. What to Buy and Why, BBC Two. 
  'Look at all those useless things down the in and out shop, now, Iestyn, put out so as to be directly in your eyeline, with Lara’s Theme from Doctor Zhivago piped around the shelves,' was how my mother put it. 
  Neurological testing has proved the opening phrase of Lara's Theme inspires an acute sense of lacking something.  In my case, apparently, a train set for my Muswell Hill student digs, an ironing-board cover (I didn't have an iron, let alone an ironing board) and all Ten Commandments toast stamps. It was week six of the spring term before I finally completed the set with: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
  Then I needed to buy a new, king size, toaster.
  Oh, and a bigger loaf tin. I make my own bread, you see. 

  So, stuff will be displayed directly in your eyeline in a shop.  Take note. 
  Antidote? Don't look at it. 

  Then there's the piped music. Slow when they want you to linger - in boutiques, art galleries or book shops they might play Satie's Gymnopedies. Fast when they want you out in and out of there sharpish - in supermarkets, sex shops and Starbucks they play the Lone Ranger section of the William Tell Overture
  Antidote? Take an accordion into the shop with you and accompany yourself in medium-fast songs such as "Ding Dong Dell, Pussy'y in the Well", "If you Knew Susie like I Know Susie" and "My Old Woman's an Awful Boozer".

  Display signs will be in red. Red for danger; the danger being you might miss out on buying something you don't remotely need. We fear missing out much more than we enjoy acquiring, natch. 
  Antidote: take a magenta magic marker with you to recolour the sign. Magenta is the colour of harmony and balance. 

  Nearest the aisle shop owners will put things that entice you to touch them - shiny, padded, velvety, furry, 
  Antidote?  A sprig of barbed wire. 

  My mother used her knowledge of these psychological techniques when she volunteered in the Waterloo Action Centre library and needed to get borrowing numbers up.  With glitter sprayed rabbit fur and Red Label whisky miniatures taped to their covers, she suspended at eye-level from the ceiling, over a speaker broadcasting a loop of Gary Jules's Mad World, the ever so lesser taken out Sophie Kinsella collection. 
  

  
  
  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I've been going for tr

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded, simpering flounce reminded them of the girls

Where Babies Come From...

Haberdashery Girls... An excerpt from my forthcoming book of interviews:   Where Babies Come From. I asked people, ‘How were you told the facts of life?’ And, ‘What information were you given?’ Here is Belinda, who used to be an escort.  She is now in her eighties. My sister read about Dutch caps.  We looked at Old Masters paintings and wondered how having those funny big white hats on their heads would stop women getting pregnant. In British Guiana, we had native servants who would do the deed al fresco au natural.  From the age of five, I was playing 'sex' with my dolls.  They’d have their dolls’ tea party, a recitation lesson, then I’d have them mount each other. When we came back to England, I had a nanny.   Katrin was fresh from the convent. She was all mummy could get for me.  I expect it was a time of general strikes.  Mummy would send Katrin for breaks back to the convent meanwhile sending me for remedial elocution.  This would happen when I’d said one too many ‘tinks’,