Hey there, Ms. DebtFree checking in for the week!
Alrighty, so I promised I would be totally honest on here,
yeah? Well, I love shopping. More specifically, I love discount
shopping. And in order to get great
discounts what have I done? Subscribed
to emails from all of my favorite stores.
Apparently every store I’ve ever been to in my life became a favorite in
just one trip!
My personal challenge for the week was to find ways to cut
back on shopping, or at the very least find ways to decrease the temptation to
go shopping. My work schedule has been
absolutely bananas (politically correct way of saying “complete sh*t”) the last
week or so and I didn’t have it in me to spend a lot of time or energy on
saving money. So, I came up with a
completely free and relatively easy way to change how often I think about
shopping: unsubscribe to any email from a store. Sounds simple, right? I discovered that’s not always the case.
Unclogging My Inbox
The easiest store email I unsubscribed from was good ol’
Walmart, of all places. I clicked that
microscopic “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email and it led me to page
where I could select which categories of email I didn’t want anymore, or I could
select “unsubscribe from all,” and I was done.
Most stores were not so easy.
Many of them had an “are you sure” prompt before leading me to the
unsubscribe options. Others I felt like
I was clicking through multiple levels of shopping hell in order to break
free! The funniest ones were the stores
where I got offered a discount if I would only click that I made a horrible
mistake and did, in fact, want to keep receiving their inbox-clogging
offers!
If I’m giving away marketing
awards, Fitbit is the clear winner. Not
only did I have to click “yes” to unsubscribe after reading a guilt-inducing
paragraph on all I’d miss out on if I no longer got their emails, but I also
had a depressing farewell by the most dejected Fitbit I’ve ever seen. Way to go, marketing team. You successfully made me feel like a bad
person for making that Fitbit sad.
Screenshot of what I've been dealing with this week! |
Realizing I've Been Had
Okay, what’s the point of this story? Well, for one I had no idea that
unsubscribing would be such a pain in the tush!
I think most places realize if you have to click more than once or
twice, people will give up, will keep seeing all those cute ads, and will
eventually see something that piques their interest enough to get them into the
store.
The next thing I realized was how often I want to go
shopping only because I saw a coupon or “something pretty” in a store
email. We don’t have cable in our house
so commercials are a rare thing. All of
my advertising exposure is through these god-awful emails, snail mail, or the radio. Junk mail goes in recycling without being
looked at. I usually skip to another
radio station during commercial breaks.
But darn if I don’t open those emails every single time.
And yeah, I know I need to work on my self-control, whatever. Personally, I’d rather just avoid clever
marketing tactics altogether and I’ll work on my shopping self-control another year
day.
Anyway, unsubscribing was my easy way to kill the shopping
bug this week. If any of you have other
fun (and minimal effort) ways to spend less, hit me up in the comments below!
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Every. Single. Time. I also love Pinterest! |
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