Confessions of a shopaholic

“It’s like you were challenging the poor guy,” my friend told me just after I snubbed the coffee mugs the shopkeeper was showing to me and walked away. “He is just selling ceramic, it’s not gold. You are not making investments,” he said, as I gleefully moved on to the next shop selling similar stuff.
I was on a happy trip to Dilli Haat and was in a perfectly happy, happy mood. But the word ‘challenging’ lingered for the rest of the day. This friend, a male, accompanies me to almost all splurging trips and perhaps has, by now, mastered my tricks of shopping. Whenever I ask him which colour or design to pick, he smirks, and says, “Will you pick what I ask you to?”
He knows, and I won’t.
But if men don’t know, or don’t want to know, what goes behind choosing a particular colour, they better stop “helping” us. Or, better, we women should go to those selected shops where the keepers are from the fair sex. That way, at least, both will be relieved of the tension of the battles to be fought every other hour, every other day. What actually is the science behind how women shop and how men shop?
They claim women spend unnecessarily lengthy time to choose and finalise or drop the whole idea of buying something, while they are those smart things who take decisions instantly. While we claim that most shopping decisions taken by men are lousy, colour combinations rubbish and they often go for ‘not-the-best-of-best’ offers.
Frankly, my shopping, more often than not, involves a serious series of calculated, methodical and economical steps to choosing, selecting, pondering, cross-questioning and then finally loosening the purse strings. But I never thought that my serious series of calculated steps could actually challenge shopkeepers. It must have – because after I asked the shopkeeper to pack four different colours of the same form of coffee mug with different prints, he looked flummoxed.
If challenging is the word – then be it! At least I will have a peaceful sleep if I match the colours right. Did I finally pick the right mugs, sis?