Shopping - A Necessary Evil

Shopping. I dislike shopping. A lot.

Shopping has filled many needs for me in the past. I can remember one point in time when I filled the shopping cart to fill a void (much the way I now eat L ...). Other times, shopping was pure recreation. It was our family's preferred form of entertainment. There were the Dog Days of Summer when we shopped to find a cool spot to be (before the days of living in an air conditioned home). Shopping was fun.

Then there was shopping on a budget. A time when the only time I allowed myself to spend, was in the grocery store. Buying groceries was the only place where I filled my need to fork over my hard earned cash and receive goods in return for the favor. Grocery shopping became my fun.

Then there were the Daycare Days when it felt like there were simply not enough hours in the day. I investigated on-line grocery shopping at one point in time until I realized that it was not necessarily the act of shopping that I had come to despise, it was the time involved in putting everything away. I bought a lot of groceries in those days. Unpacking the groceries was a job that took as much time as going out and buying them. Grocery shopping became a chore.

Shopping has lost its lustre along the way.

Fast forward to today ... shopping in almost every form has become something that I squeeze into the cracks of life.

When I must buy groceries, I like to pick them up on my way home from work. I don't have much expendable cash these days, so I find that I am less tempted to overspend if I am in a hurry to get home. This trick seems to be working well for me.

Thank goodness for WalMart. It is the one-stop-shopping-spot that allows me to cross off many items that seem to accumulate over the month. Thankfully they have moved half-way-to-the-next-small-town, so it is a store that I never drive past on my way home from work for those quick pit stops. But when we do make the trek, it usually means that I don't have to stop anywhere else that day. And I like that. I like that alot.

Clothes shopping. Blech!! I do have one store that I gravitate towards but I cannot afford to look at clothes until they are out of season and on sale. Trust me, I have tried. But I simply cannot pay full price for these items that may or may not work for me once I take them home. Oh, what I would give for a personal clothes shopper. I do not love the way age and gravity has affected my body. But I have learned that some styles and cuts accentuate the change, while others camouflage it a little bit. I hate the time it takes to find camouflage wear ...

Shoes. Thank goodness I came upon a shoe store that specializes in hard-to-fit-feet. My feet finally have a place to call their own. But oh-my-gosh ... the prices!! I could buy half a month's worth of groceries for the price I pay for shoes that make my feet happy. But the investment will last much, much longer than the groceries do. So once I perfect the art of buying something once and not returning it a few times, this is an investment in time and money worth making.

So you can imagine the small squeal of pleasure that coursed through my veins this morning when I realized that I had a spare eyeliner pencil on hand when my current one ran out. Immediately thereafter I made a mental note that my deodorant was also running on empty and I had a vague memory of stocking up on that when it was on sale as well. Then I proceeded to fill up the empty soap container with the back-up supply of liquid soap ...

Oh, how I appreciate the warehouse system of supplies that I have on hand!! To know that (in many cases)I have a back up on hand is a luxury that not everyone can afford.

Yes, I have come to dislike shopping as a form of recreation. It is a necessary evil and it gobbles up much more of the budget than I want it to. But in the end, we have food in our fridge and cupboards; a back up supply in a closet ... we have clothes on our back; shoes on our feet and many luxury items to keep us fresh, clean and satisfy the vanity in me (the back up supply of eyeliner and eyebrow pencils is living a life of excess. I know).

We are blessed.