Holiday season and impulse buying | Sunday Observer

Holiday season and impulse buying

15 December, 2019
Set aside specific days and budgets for shopping, travelling, visiting friends and other activities. This will help prevent the last-minute scramble to buy gifts. Here guests at the opening of a clothing store. Pic: Chaminda Niroshana
Set aside specific days and budgets for shopping, travelling, visiting friends and other activities. This will help prevent the last-minute scramble to buy gifts. Here guests at the opening of a clothing store. Pic: Chaminda Niroshana

With improved income by way of bonuses and numerous promotional offers by various marketing organisations and channels, you are tempted to spend money on impulse buying – buying products and services that you can be without.

Like your personal relationships, your financial situation can cause stress during this season. The strain of shopping, visiting friends and relatives, attending social gatherings and parties, and preparing holiday meals can make you really tired while the intention is to spend the season to treat yourself after an year of hard work, sweat and pain in a tough and most uncertain environment.

Feeling exhausted increases your stress, creating a vicious cycle. Some try to celebrate with the intention of beating others – trying to outdo others. Holiday destinations, food and accommodation, entertaining friends and gifts are areas where comparisons are made. Know your capacity and do what’s right for you.

Business organisations on the other hand would plan to cash in their old stocks and increase the overall volume of business.

Given that the competition gets intense with temporarily bloated valets of the customers every single business will offer various incentives to entice the customers to benefit from the seasonal demand. Certainly it’s a good idea to get the benefit from this business climate, but you should use more of your head than your heart.

The idea of a holiday season is to bring your stress level down and be rejuvenated to enhance performance post holiday season. You shouldn’t do anything during the holiday season that is unplanned, but use the space meaningfully to treat you and your family well. Set aside specific days and budgets for shopping, travelling, visiting friends and other activities. This will help prevent a last-minute scramble to buy gifts, going places, visiting relatives which can be counterproductive.

The right choice

Before you go shopping, decide how much money you can afford to spend on gifts and other items. Then be sure to stick to your budget. If you don’t, you could feel anxious and tense for months afterward as you struggle to pay the bills.

Learn to say no. Believe it or not, people will understand if you can’t do certain activities during this period. If you say yes only to what you really want to do, you’ll avoid feeling resentful and overwhelmed. If it’s really not possible to say no when your boss asks you to work overtime, try to remove something else from your agenda to make up for the lost time.

When to attack

For businesses, there is a choice to make between joining the band wagon with competitive offers vs using the budgets when others are silent so you can stand out. It may be more profitable and effective for you to attack your competitors when they have depleted their budgets. Making some time for yourself during the holiday season with annual eave being used is paramount. Spending sometime on your own, without distractions, may refresh you enough. Don’t resolve to change your whole life to make up for past excess.

Instead, try to return to basic, healthy lifestyle routines. Set smaller, more specific goals with a reasonable time frame. Space you would find during a long holiday season is the best for this. In real life, people don’t usually resolve problems within an hour or two. Something always comes up. Remember that one key to minimising holiday stress and depression is knowing that the holidays can trigger stress and depression. Accept that things aren’t always going to go as planned. Then take active steps to manage stress and depression during the holidays. You may actually enjoy the holidays this year more than you thought you could. 

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