Is online shopping shrinking our thinking?
It’s the 2020s, online shopping is more popular than ever.
With so many benefits to buying online, it’s easy to see why it has become more and more popular. Shopping at the click of a button allows you to browse through thousands of items which can be delivered to your door at your own convenience, putting you in control of the whole shopping process.
However, aside from the impact it is having on our high streets, could online shopping be having a more serious side-effect that we need to think more carefully about? Let’s explore.
The shrinking shopping space
Walk into any decent sized high street record shop and you’ll be confronted with a whole array of vinyl, CDs, DVDs, books and more. Things that you can pick up, touch, read and get a sense of what treasures might lie inside. For many music lovers, music is about the whole experience. The artwork on the album cover, the stories told in the CD notes and the anticipation of getting home and putting your new purchase into the CD player, or on the turntable and cranking up the speakers.
In contrast, to shop for an album download on a mobile phone, just make a few clicks and you’re done. However, whilst you might be able to listen to a preview clip from a track before you buy, you never get to physically feel or see the same full product and the gap between purchase and listening to the album can be mere seconds. An altogether different shopping experience.
Testing the use of our senses
When we shop online, we potentially deny ourselves the opportunity to practice using and testing our senses.
What looks, feels, sounds and smells like a good purchase, using our full sensory experience to make a shopping decision is very different to making a quick purchase online, where we may just see a picture and brief description of the product and perhaps, a few product reviews.
That might not sound like it matters if we’re happy with our online purchases, but shopping is a key way that we test our senses. Great chefs for example choose ingredients not only by sight, but by feeling and smelling the freshness or ripeness of the produce. In turn, that sensory experience drives the decision making and thinking of the chef. For example, is that produce fresh and if so, what other produce is fresh and what can I cook with it?
Suppressing our senses restricts our thinking
For a chef, suppressing the senses when buying potentially means that the dishes that he/she can create from the purchased ingredients aren’t of the desired quality. In turn, that decision making could drive customers away from a restaurant.
For non-chefs or people making other purchases, if you suppress the use of the senses by shopping predominantly online, then you are also limiting the quality of your thinking in making a purchase, because the purchasing decision is made without having a real feel for the quality or condition of the product.
Of course, much online shopping allows you to conveniently make repeat purchases or return inferior or unsuitable goods, which is great. But if we reduce the amount of times that we use our senses to make all of our shopping decisions, there is a risk that we start to make quicker, less thought through and more irrational shopping decisions.
When poor shopping decisions translate into poor decisions more generally
Poor shopping decisions can lead to unwanted purchases, spending spiralling out of control and big debts. But there is also a danger that in getting into the habit of making poor shopping decisions, those poor decision making habits sneakily drift into other parts of our lives.
Our gut feeling is an incredibly useful sense in that it alerts us to when something feels fundamentally wrong about something. In doing so, it also allows us to stop and rationally think through whether that feeling may be right. But the less that we use all of our senses to play a part in decision making processes (such as shopping), the less likely we are to cultivate a healthy gut feeling about other things.
Ultimately if we choose to spend a large part of our lives shopping online, then there is a possibility that our decision making becomes based less on rational thinking using our correct sensory experiences and more on impulsive, unthought through behaviours which feed into other harmful habits such as the need for instant gratification (e.g. same day delivery).
What’s your type of bookshop?
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that there are many independent retailers who flourish amidst the online competition and I think that’s because they encourage people to experience and enjoy the full sensory shopping experience.
One of my favourite bookshops has miles and miles of bookshelves, where you can walk for hours, stop, pick up a book and get a sense of whether it might be an interesting read, or ask one of the highly knowledgeable assistants whether there are any other new or recommended paperbacks. Shopping in this way helps you to practice using your senses to guide rational decision making. It also results in more suitable purchases. For me, shopping online just doesn’t cut the same mustard.
Don’t shrink the way that you think
Whilst the convenience that online shopping provides can definitely come in useful from time to time, there are hidden dangers.
When you start to shut off the regular use of all of your senses, you lose sensory awareness as a result and that ultimately affects the way that you think, because our thought processes are dependent on how we feel too.
As we go through the 2020s, perhaps it’s also the right time to stop and think about the impact that our shopping habits are having on other areas of our lives. It feels ironic that in a more connected 24/7 global world, we may unknowingly be becoming less connected to our thought processes through the way that we shop. And if we become less connected to our own thoughts, there is a danger that we all become less well connected to each other.
