Shopping thoughts

I sat down to write a couple of hours ago, wrote and wrote and wrote, read it over, and realized "Hey...I'M not even interested in this." LOL It happens. :)

But I'll touch a bit on what I was talking about.

Shopping.

Yeah, I'm a girl, and I shop a lot...in SL. Most people would be surprised that RL me isn't much of a shopper at all. When I had to go out of town for the funeral this month, shopping for clothes to wear was pretty much the first REAL shopping that I've done this year. Buying 3 dresses and a pair of heels was odd for me in RL. But buying clothes everyday in SL is just...well, it's just an everyday thing.

And that got me wondering - Why is shopping such a huge part of SL?

Think about your inventory for a moment. No no, really THINK about it. How much stuff do you have? For most men, it's jeans, shirts, suits, shoes, and a variety of other little things but they have what they need. For women? Oh, forget it! I know that we're all carting around more than we will EVER wear and more than we will EVER need. You hear us moan about how badly we need to organize inventory all the time! But do we ever really stop shopping to DO it?

If you stopped shopping right this moment, and only changed clothes twice a day [as many of us do in RL], how many days would you be able to wear 2 different outfits without repeating? I know I'd probably be able to go more than a month. I'm not gonna, but I COULD. :-p And my inventory isn't even as large as some are.

I'm collecting, on average, approximately 3 outfits, minus shoes, a day. And that very well may be a low number. But let's say 3. That's 21 outfits a week. In a month of 30 days, that's 630 outfits. And half of those are folders with at LEAST 5 pieces... Holy cow, it's no wonder my inventory is ballooning.

And this of course doesn't take into account the fact that I need shoes to go with outifts [although I really don't buy many shoes at all], different hair styles to match, and accessories.

But again, the question is WHY we feel the need to shop so much. Is it that we love it? Or is it that we've been trained to do it? Think about it. For most of us, the first thing we learned in SL was that we HAD to shop to make ourselves look presentable. So we shopped, whether for freebies or not, we shopped. And we made friends, and our friends took us shopping, talked about shopping, wrote about shopping. A lot of us learned about fashion blogs, and suddenly we had these beautiful avatars telling us where to shop and what to buy. I'm not bad about it now, but in the beginning I was, as many were, just as trained as one of Pavlov's dogs. Especially where Freestyle and FabFree were concerned. They'd send a notice, I'd drop whatever I was doing and run and end up with 15 other avatars on my head who had done the same thing. It takes something pretty special now to catch my eye, but back then...if it was a gift, it was mine, even if I didn't really need or want it.

Thinking about all of this isn't going to make me less likely to shop. Not at all. LOL But it is interesting to think about.