Shop(hop)ping

People who fail to plan, plan to fail is the saying but I have seen plans for shopping always fail in our family. I think after talking /chatting /discussing /arguing (hope u get the point), shopping is the second most spontaneous thing we do. So off we went to buy some essentials for my brother, for him to take home.

Me and my mother didn't want to go to the one stop mall so we both went to do our own small errands. I had left my debit card at home (not on purpose!) and we only had so much money with ourselves. And totally forgetting to ask my father for more, we started off . For each and everything we bought that day we had to think whether we had money for it and bought stuff that we really needed. Of course more money was just a phone call or a few steps away. Meanwhile, further window shopping resulted in my liking a saree hanging in a shop and we paid for it with hundred's and even our ten's and five's. The shopkeeper gave us a look that could have meant ,"Haven't u both heard about debit/credit cards?" We were both laughing at what we did as it had been a long time that we had shopped thus.

This really reminded me of those good old days when every dress or every item was bought after giving a careful thought to its utility and worth and therefore they were always priced possessions and used till they could be used. Our shopping spree always ended with a pride of accomplishment or sometimes with disappointment soothed away with my favourite chocobar at the end of the day and a promise, 'that next time you get what you ask for'. Not that we didn't have money, but we were always reminded that we should value it coz it was hard earned, and the usual cliche' of money not growing on trees was sometimes used too.

After the advent of plastic money, shopping has never been the same. All of us, I think all those of us who have these cards nowadays buy whatever we like, anything and everything that catches our fancy and after sometime, don't even try to find a use for it. There is nothing that is dear to us, there is nothing that we buy after evaluation or after selecting the best of the lot. We take a cart and pull off whatever we see, dump all of it at the back of our car/bike, bring it home and use only half of it.

So shopping is not that much fun anymore (to me at least!). I do understand the convenience of debit/credit cards but still I would sure like to revisit those good old days at least on some occasions like the one above.