Mention the phrase ‘defensive shopping’ to most people and those who have heard the expression before will probably think that it refers to not succumbing to temptation, impulse buying or sales pressure. In other words, defending yourself against spending too much.

This is a complete misuse of the term. It also suggests that we are all morons who can’t even take a tour around a supermarket without returning home with enough food to feed the population of a third-world country.

What I understand by ‘defensive shopping’ is returning home with exactly what you wanted to buy, in an acceptable time frame and without losing your sanity in the process.

On the face of it, this seems easy and occasionally it even is. However, my experience is that in the vast majority of cases you are likely to spend far too long in the shop, fail to get what you want and return home in a thoroughly bad mood. And why? Well, in some cases the shop itself definitely has something to do with it. Take my local supermarkets, for example. Almost without exception, they have a weird pricing policy. When it comes to ‘normal’, run-of-the-mill products, there’s no problem but it seems that whenever they stock anything out of the ordinary – like moose steak for example – there’s no price in sight. There’s no price on the meat and there’s no price on the shelf either. As there’s also no barcode reader, and you don’t want to wait for ages while an assistant contacts the moose department to find out the price, you have to resign yourself to a lamb chop instead. The moose might have been delicious but you’ll never know.

This is where defensive shopping comes in. There’s your moose steak, there’s the checkout. So relax. Just go ahead and put the moose in your basket. You see, the checkout does have a barcode reader. So when a price is displayed that you don’t want to pay, you just say “Good grief (or an expression of your choice) I’m not paying that much!” And you leave the moose to deteriorate at the checkout.
Of course the disadvantage of that is that you now have no dinner, but you will also know what to avoid buying next time.

And then of course there are the large stores that are laid out in such a way that you have to walk for miles past every single product they sell in order to buy that one thing that you entered the store specifically to get. The worst culprit for this in my experience is IKEA. IKEA stores are designed by the same people who make those ‘escape from Castle Wolfstein’ computer games. Typically you enter the shop at the top floor, but the exit is on the ground floor. You want a bookshelf and indeed there are bookshelves on display wherever you look. Along with lots and lots of other things. So your first task is to locate the bookshelf that you saw in the catalogue or the Internet site without getting sidetracked in the bathroom department and without using one of those very large blue bags that can hold up to 100 small, dispensable gadgets. Then, having found your bookshelf, you now have to note the number and track it down in the warehouse section, which is on the ground floor via kitchen equipment, soft furnishings, candles, picture frames, lighting…. and is signposted by small blue signs in very unobvious places. You see the name of the game here is to keep you in the shop.

Shopping defensively at IKEA is a major challenge. But it can be done. You see, what most visitors don’t realise is that at IKEA it is actually possible to enter the shop on the ground floor. Obviously this isn’t very well signposted but have a look around and you’ll probably find an automatic sliding door that will let you straight into….well, not the warehouse as that would be too much to ask but pretty close to it anyway. Now armed with the product number that you got from the catalogue or website, you can track down the bookshelf and go straight to the checkout. (And don’t join the queue of morons at the regular checkout –go for self service and scan your own barcode). If you’re lucky and a fast walker, you can do IKEA in 10 minutes.

But the mention of IKEA brings me to the most terrifying force confronting defensive shoppers: other shoppers. IKEA is a great example of this. You see, IKEA wants to make visiting their shop a family event. You can park your kids in the children’s corner, spend hours meandering aimlessly around the shop and then finish off the (by now extremely expensive) visit with a meal of Swedish meatballs. Haven’t these sad people got anything better to do than spend an afternoon at IKEA? Like going to Sweden, for example. And worst of all are the families who don’t park their kids in the children’s corner but take them on an exciting tour of furniture and bathroom accessories. It’s bad enough having to negotiate your interminable way through a herd of browsing shoppers without an even bigger herd of screaming kids darting in front of you at every turn.

Defensive shopping strategy: if you want something from IKEA, try to go there when everyone else is at work. Okay, it will mean taking time off but it’s worth it.

But IKEA is not alone in breeding the shopper from hell. Far, far worse is the local hypermarket on a Saturday afternoon, for ‘tis then that the dreaded shopping businessman makes his appearance. This man is a captain of industry and is used to giving orders and generally being in charge. Unfortunately he has been obliged to accompany his wife to buy the week’s groceries. That’s all you need: an over-inflated ego in charge of a shopping trolley. As a captain of industry, he has a God-given right to monopolise all of the space and be first to the special offers. If he knows where they are. Typically he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t know where anything is and tends to stare off vacantly into space looking vaguely angry.

Defensive strategy: either behave like a captain of industry who knows where everything is, or avoid the hypermarket on Saturday afternoons.

And of course, there are the pensioners. Those sweet, elderly people with the killer instincts of a piranha giving up smoking. Very often, these are the same people who, understandably, refuse Meals On Wheels because they are independent and can look after themselves. However, this does not stop them from playing the Age Card when it comes to being first in line. They have mastered the art of the shopping trolley, holding it parallel to the shelf at arm’s length so no one else can get near. They painstakingly count out their small change at the checkout so that they match the bill exactly, while the rest of us wait. They stand in front of the milk shelf for hours on end, even though the choice is only full fat and skimmed.

Defensive strategy: either limp, in which case they will defer to someone less able than themselves, or pretend to be mad – old people can’t take that.

However, sadly, the best defensive shopping strategy appears to be to stay at home and order everything by the Internet.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.