Time, Not Money, Is the Greatest Casualty of Bad Shopping Habits
What I learned from Max and our epic closet cleanse.
We are selling Max’s NEVERWORNS at Colbo at 51 Orchard Street THIS SUNDAY at 11am. I’ve been wearing his full looks all week and in the photo above…so ladies, come by! If you are new to the story of Max, go to my story archives on Instagram. PS. I wrote this Substack on the road with my laptop on my…lap.
I have been in Chicago for the past few week with my friend Max cleansing his closet. A few months ago, he told me he needed help parting with clothes and before I knew it, I was on a plane to Chicago. We immediately began to go through years of accumulated clothes. Some very great! Some so-so. Some that don’t fit at all. Many of these pieces are being donated. Many of these clothes are coming with us to this sale.
We all need help cleaning out our closets to varying degrees. For some background, I started cleaning out editor closets when I was still at Vogue. I understand our emotional ties to pieces; how we believe some pieces are life markers; the draw of sentimental value; the scarcity complexities around one-offs; the fluctuations of our body and emotions that warp our perceptions; the “what-if I need this?” mindset. It’s not easy; I get it.
Now, Max and I are currently on the road back home. Getting to New York with these garments is another story. Every few miles, this trip feels like groundhog day; another McDonald’s; another massive truck; another conversation about overconsumption. What draws us into buying so much? Why did Max buy that Doublet popcorn Shiburi top nine months ago on SSENSE? Why did I buy not one, but two Fashion Café merch varsity jackets off of eBay? I have a vintage leopard print Roberto Cavalli top that I purchased two years ago during the Y2K revival boom that has been sitting in my closet. Would I buy it now? Probably not. Max has a searing lime green baby-soft Elder Statesmen cashmere sweater that he got in a sale over a year ago. It still has the tag on it.
We love shopping just much as the next person. Max and I buy a lot of resale. (Half of Max’s wardrobe is resale; the other half is typically heavily discounted small designers). I wrote a piece a few months ago that I had been thoughtlessly purchasing pieces from online resale platforms. I noted that in theory, these items were not new so this form of shopping could be considered sustainable. It’s not like I was ordering boxes from SHEIN. But I was not spiritually sustainable. There must have been emotional or social vacancy I was trying to fill in the way that I was consuming.
During my excessive ordering era, I found myself spending a lot of time initially searching for pieces, looking at my bookmarked wants, and then debating whether or not I should buy them. And when these packages finally arrived? I wasn’t impressed about 70 percent of the time.
Max brought up the time component to me. He is a math guy who played online poker professionally for years and we’ve been talking about ROI (return on investment) in regards to how we shop. It’s not just wasting money when we are mindlessly scrolling and buying, we’re wasting time. There are time-suck 101 basics, like spending minutes (or hours) searching and searching—or rabidly checking a sale again and again. There are the other factors that add to time thievery. What if the item we’ve dedicated so much time to finding doesn’t work out? Not the right fit. Not the right style. Now, we’re spending more time in the process of returning. Or, maybe the item spends time simply sucking up space in our closet, making it even more disorganized. Where’s the value in that?
“If you think about value in terms of your time, then a lot of these deals completely go away,” says Max. Even if we are reeled in by a major sale, a flash-in-the-pan trend, or the back-burner thought of “well, I can return that,” this sort of time-wasting nullifies any value the item may have had. Keep in mind, crazy sales or rare pieces often make us react quickly and cause us to buy with less thought than we would if the item was full price or there was an abundance of it. And there is surely no return on investment if we never wear the piece. In fact, there are negative effects: We will have to deal with the physical and mental burden of the item once it is in our closets.
Max talks about time wasting logic in regards to a popular online store’s 30-day return policy. “You get this package from [REDACTED] and you think about each item because you can return it for free,” says Max, “To me that is one of the biggest hidden time sucks. Once you order it, you think you’re done. Then there is 30 day return, so then you might be thinking about it for weeks. That is just not a high-value thing to be thinking about.”
“The time spent affects your emotional attachment to the things, which is a negative,” he adds. “If you spend a lot of time researching something or seeking out a deal, then you might be biased to keep it even though deep down it doesn’t make sense.” (We’re not saying not to research or shop but do it in moderation, and do it because the piece truly fits into your wardrobe.)
We all know that we shouldn’t fall for a sale. Archival designer pieces can be super tempting. Merch is dangerous because merch is time sensitive, meaning there is a limited amount. We sometimes feel that we just need it when we don’t. So, where do we go from here? Like in my last post, I always recommend adding some friction before we press “buy”. Sleeping on it. Walking away from the computer or the phone. Deleting our autofilled card information from whatever sites we are using. We need to create space between ourselves and the potential purchase in order to think about exactly what we are putting into our closets.
We can always buy a designer shirt that doesn’t fit and potentially return it—or part with it later. But remember, there is no return policy on time spent.
Side note, new NEVERWORNS series coming soon. Keep up by watching an episode below!
Thank you for talking about the time suck. It’s so true and it’s not something I ever really thought about until my household income took a hit a few months ago and I put a freeze on clothes shopping. The amount of time I’ve freed up that I used to spend trolling the RealReal is astounding. I also realized how high my time-to-purchase ratio was. So much “research,” so little to show for it. Time is the one thing you can never get back, and I’m hoping to be a lot more considerate about the amount of time I spend shopping mindlessly (and usually not even buying anything!) from now on.
Yes to all of this. And to friction!
The thing I’m reaching for lately — and actively so this year —is “inconvenience”. Making it harder to get things, and building in opportunities for real world interactions along the way. I find it adds value to the experience and the outcome.
Also, a online frictional barrier I’ve found helpful is a having a secret Pinterest board, where I save things I like rather than clicking buy. It slows the path to purchase right down (and most of the time you don’t end up buying it, or if you do, it’s months later) and also acts as a way to catalogue all that “research” without needing to take ownership of the item in question.