The on-line shopping dilemma

Amy Suardi at Frugal Mama has been blogging this week about online shopping. Her first post on the subject describes the ways it can save shoppers money; her second post addresses techniques for maximizing the efficiency, affordability and cybersafety of online shopping. The final post in this three-part series will recommend specific online retailers, which will be useful to me since I do very little online shopping.

My feelings about this approach are mixed. In general, I use online shopping only for the most basic and obvious websites and items, such as Amazon.com (of which I’m a big fan) and L.L. Bean. I’m very late to the idea of shopping for everyday goods like groceries, personal care items and office supplies online, though the first post in the Frugal Mama series convinced me that it can be a sensible way to shop.

Reading Amy’s posts, I realized it’s surprising I don’t do more online shopping, given how much I dislike driving. I live in a semi-rural suburb where the nearest supermarket is fifteen minutes away and the nearest discount superstore at least a 25-minute drive. I’m always looking for ways to spend less time in the car, so online shopping seems like a natural fit for me. Although I’ve always associated it with a wasteful and impetuous shopping style – think of the stereotype of the insomniac woman buying expensive shoes and jewelry from her computer in the wee hours of the night – Amy points out the many ways it can actually save money, such as by reducing on-the-spot impulse buys and resisting the entreaties children make for purchases on shopping excursions.

So now I’m thinking: could I reduce my weekly-at-a-minimum trips to the supermarket, gourmet store, drugstore as well as my monthly-or-more stops at the discount clothing store and hardware store by paying more attention to online shopping? More importantly, do I want to?

I’m still not sure. It’s true that I try to minimize driving-around time, but my aversion to errands has made me a more efficient shopper, and has in itself helped me to save money. I wait until I have an accumulation of errands to do, and when I need only a few items from the supermarket, I try to stretch what I have rather than automatically buying more, which has made me a more creative cook as well as a thriftier one.

On the other hand, I do love the sense of efficiency that seeing items delivered to my door would give me. To think, I was writing or editing or housecleaning or reading with my children while someone else was doing my shopping: what’s a better application of multitasking than that? Why spend my time at the supermarket when paid staffers are willing to do it for me?

And yet I really don’t think I’m ready to give up the shopping experience at this point. While it’s true that I don’t like frequent errands, saving up my errands for a week and then hitting five necessary stops at once (last week it was the bagel store, the supermarket, the office supply store, the post office and the dry cleaner in one fell swoop) gives me a great feeling of accomplishment. And even though sometimes it’s onerous, I do think shopping can be a good experience for children. Recently my kids have become fond of supermarket “scavenger hunts,” in which I deploy the two of them as a team to locate specific items from the list and bring them back to me. (My son is 11, old enough to take responsibility for the two of them in the store.) It’s fun for them, it’s useful to me and I think on some level it’s educational, too, testing their navigational and reading skills as they make their way first to the right aisle and then back to the cart.

It seems to me, though, that the biggest issue in considering online shopping is making the decision to buck the “buy local” campaign, which is a significant trend in our region though perhaps less so in New York City, where Amy is blogging from. My parents are as supportive of small local businesses as anyone I know; they’ll do things like buy a toaster at a small family-owned hardware store or a children’s gift at a local toy boutique just to support local shop owners. I’m not quite as willing to make the small financial sacrifices they are; I buy my toasters at Target rather than Vanderhoof’s Hardware, but even that is a step closer to home than buying from an online retailer.

And sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line. While in theory I value the presence of independent booksellers over big box bookstores, in no small part because they are more likely to give small-time writers like me visibility, the Barnes and Noble two towns away employs locals as well, and just as many flesh-and-blood people work at our nearby Starbucks as at the family-owned bakery down the street. I don’t feel able to judge which employees deserve their jobs more. For that matter, online retailers have employees of their own, and so does UPS, which employs the drivers who bring us the goods we’ve ordered.

Although I'm not a big holiday shopper, I’ll be shopping more in the next six weeks or so than I do at other times of year, so this is a good time to consider how I want to go about it and what kinds of stores I want to support. By the end of the holiday season, I’ll have probably ended up drawing on a combination of independent stores, big-box stores and online retailers. My seven-year-old daughter was writing a story earlier this week in which her main character went Christmas shopping. Holly wrote this: “Louise loved the mall. She loved all the fancy things. She loved all the people walking around. She loved all the shops and stores. But best of all, she loved to shop.” I’m assuming that’s a reflection of how Holly herself feels at this point, and it sounds pretty good to me. I don’t especially want a shopaholic daughter, but I like the fact that she appreciates the visual stimulation and the sociability of the mall.

So we’ll probably do as much live shopping as we can bear this holiday season, though ideally at small local shops and not the mall, and when we’ve burned out on it – which I can assure you I will quite early in the process – we’ll go home, make a pot of coffee, and do some online ordering from the comfort of our own beloved home.