Retail Therapy

It has been all quiet on my shopping front for several months now. Apart from a couple of clothing essentials, I've managed to restrain myself from too many spending binges for quite some time. Actually, there wasn't that much restraint involved because it has been post-Christmas sale time and so the shops were filled with cheap rubbish I didn't want to buy.

Well, apart from the Mulberry handbag I crave and the Ted Baker leather jackets that have tempted me for several years now. I have been considering buying the handbag, which I've tried on (yes, you can try on a handbag) several times now and which is gorgeous, but I know I can probably save almost £100 if I wait long enough because one of the online retailers will do a 20% off sale or I'll fly from Heathrow Terminal 5 where they have a Mulberry shop that sells at tax-free prices. I also wanted to wait until at least next month because I will then have received my first month's pay at my new salary and I think it's acceptable to treat myself. In the meantime, I've been squirreling away money in my ISA and getting a buzz from saving that is almost as good as the splurging buzz.

The jacket is cheaper than the handbag and I also had a £50 Ted Baker voucher so I considered making that my treat instead of the bag. I do have several jackets already, though, and while I would like a leather jacket, I'm not sure the TB ones are quite right (they come up quite short, which would probably annoy me or my kidneys). It's likely that I will also chicken out of buying the bag too. I do have a Mulberry bag already and I really shouldn't buy a second.

I was in a spending mood today, though, and now I've used my Ted Baker voucher. I needed some more smart/work clothes so I bought this Ted Baker skirt. I wanted another plain but smart skirt for work so I headed to Banana Republic. They didn't have any suitable skirts but they did have a long, drapey black cardigan, which is another of the wardrobe basic items on my to-buy list. It was £49.50, which isn't cheap but it's well-made and well-cut so I thought this was fine. When I got to the till, though, I found that the tag said £55 instead. I went back to the rack and saw that the extra smalls were all tagged as £55 and all of the other sizes were £49.50. I took two of the cardigans to the till and said that I'd heard of shops charging more for larger sizes but not for smaller sizes. When the staff checked, it turned out that the £55 price tags were correct and I thought for a moment that I was going to have to pay that price but I argued that if they had labelled the items as £49.50, they really had to sell them at that price. And so I saved myself £5.50; I would have bought the cardigan regardless but I'd have been annoyed if I'd had to pay the higher price.

Hopefully, I will have got the shopping cravings out of my system now. Living slightly further away from Marylebone High Street, Selfridges and Regent Street than I used to does remove the temptation to some extent but as pretty spring clothes and accessories start to come into the shops, my SADdened mind will start to think of the warmer climes associated with those clothes.