I come from a long line of shoppers. My grandmother and mother are professional shoppers by all accounts, they take it very serious. It is more like a sport, think of their credit card balances as a score card, the one with the smaller balance wins. These two know how to work the system to get the best deals, shop the sales before the sale and then return the items during to sale only to re-buy them at a lower price. They know all the sales people at the department stores. When my grandmother died she had 4 closets full of clothes, shoes and handbags, most of which still had the tags on. She didn't like wearing the clothes as much as she liked the idea of having something new and the game of buying.
As a kids I was conditioned to shop. I would be taken along on these all day shopping sprees and even had to bring extra shoes in case my feet hurt. This spilled over into my life and I love to shop, I love to go into store and look, I love to shop online. So not buying anything for a year is going to be very hard, so to help myself I am removing temptation . . . unsubscribing to any retail store's emails, cancelling catalogues from retailers and cancelling my magazine subscriptions.
Fingers crossed this helps, at least it's going to save some paper!
