A Week of Unsubscribing

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!

Every. Single. Time.
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