On the Boxing Day sales and how op shops have ruined malls for me

As regular readers of this blog would know, I’m not one to buy anything new if I can help it and tend to avoid big shopping centres like the plague. But this year, I was feeling nostalgic – in my younger years, my cousin and I loved heading into the city for the Boxing Day sales and spending hours in Myer* buying unnecessary (but CHEAP!) stuff, so I decided to revisit those days. Seeing as it has been possibly a decade since I was at any big sales, I eased myself into it by avoiding Boxing Day and going out on the slightly-less-frantic 27th instead, looking for fairly boring items (I even wrote a list on the back of an envelope so I wouldn’t get distracted) like sheets, skincare stuff and sneakers – ie, things that I feel it’s better/easier to buy new. But after a couple of hours wandering fairly aimlessly through Melbourne’s big malls, I just felt overwhelmed and needed to get off the crazy consumer cycle. All those years of shopping at markets and op shops mean I now have a major issue with buying brand new things. It kind of freaks me out when I go into a shop where there are rows and rows of clothes in a full range of sizes and you can just go in there and find your size straight away. Where’s the excitement in that? I’m much more used to rifling through racks of secondhand stuff and occasionally turning up a treasure – or not. It’s just how I shop. When I do need to buy brand new things, sustainability issues tend to determine how I spend – and there are not many bricks and mortar stores selling eco-friendly goods in the city! So the side of me (that would be the Asian side, he he…) that cannot resist a bargain and was itching to part with cash to get cheap crap had to be satisfied by a trip to the supermarket instead.

 

These were all half price or less! And there is nothing wrong with them except that apparently no one wants to eat Christmas stuff after Christmas. Personally, I am very partial to a mince pie in the middle of March, or rich fruit cake in the cooler months such as June, so if I manage to keep them that long I will be enjoying festive fare much later in the year. Of course, none of these foods fit in with my plan to eat more healthily after the feasting of the silly season is over, and yes, I know the big supermarkets are evil (I try to avoid them too, as much as I can) but did I mention THESE WERE ALL HALF PRICE OR LESS!?

When I got home, lugging all this loot, I jumped online to look for eco-friendly bed linen, which I definitely had not seen in any of the shops in the city, and got some sheets that turned out to be cheaper than some of the sets I had looked at in the homewares shops AND they were certified organic cotton too. When are the big stores going to start stocking things like this? Or do they already? Seeing as I visit big retailers as little as possible, and given the spending frenzy that was going on around me, it’s quite likely that I just didn’t notice, so let me know if any of the chain stores are actually catering for eco-conscious customers (especially if they are having a MASSIVE SALE!). How about you, did you brave the Boxing Day madness and come out alive (and loaded down with bargains)?

 

*This was in gentler times, before people were at risk of losing digits in the post-Christmas retail rush.