Shopping with Wife

When I was bachelor, shopping for me was to go to my regular shops (a couple of them), select the stuff which catches my eye, pay and leave within max 15 minutes. And that’s how it still works if I am shopping without my wife.

Shopping with the wife has opened my eyes to an analytic, economic, gradual process of scrutinizing the plethora of options available. I am really bedazzled by her knowledge of colors. My shade-card, I could count on my fingers; but her color list needs a hefty hard-drive to store it. There are many colors which I didn’t know and yet can’t pronounce well!

While shopping, I act as an assistant as she might ask whether I like the stuff or not. It’s not that she wants to go with my decision. She uses me when she had made the chaos out of the well maintained shelves in the shop and now wants to try (read it as ruin) some other shop for more options. What she does is that she asks me “What do you think about this stuff?” while making an uninterested face (which is the hint for me to say no). And as soon as I say no, she moves out; making me the culprit of putting the shop upside down.

I really pity the guys working in those shops. If I put myself in their shoes, I must have committed suicide by now instead of folding and unfolding the countless cloths and eventually realizing that my shop is good for nothing, there is not a single piece of cloth or a pair of shoe which could barely match her expectations.

Time passed by and now our son too company us while shopping for her, though he considers it as a nightmare (like father like son), it helps me to share that helpless look, while my wife has another option to use son’s irritation to move out of the shop.

Now, as I am backed by the years of experience, I have discovered the pattern my wife follows. What I learnt is that it’s the very first (or the second) shop from where she would eventually buy, provided it’s a good bargain (that’s another story in itself); but still goes through all those shops as a hurricane creating mess afterwards with a hope that she might find something better than the first shop, which seldom happens.