Online shopping is tempting. Especially something as easy as shopping with Amazon Prime. You order a cute pair of rain boots and then within two days they magically appear at the mail center. This system is practically flawless, except for when you begin to take things too far.
I recently had a few weeks when I felt that my wardrobe needed to be refreshed. You know that feeling when you’re spending way more time than necessary trying to find something presentable… Normally I would just go to a store and pick out a few cute things on sale. In college, however, it seems to be practically impossible to find a time where you can get yourself to the mall.
I should have seen the warning signs. I was fixated on buying new things, and didn’t really care where they came from. One night, after a particularly rough outfit choice that morning, I found myself on Amazon Prime looking at crew neck sweatshirts, a clothing item that appears harmless, but turned into a nightmare.
After a relatively short turn-around I got the notification that I had a package at the mail center, but when I got there, I received the world’s smallest box. It was basically the width of a paperback you would read in eighth grade, yet somehow contained three full sized sweatshirts.
My stomach sank when I opened the package to reveal sweatshirts made from what I can only assume was a paper product. They more closely resembled a taped together table cloth than the picture advertised online. Just to make the situation better, they smelled like plastic and sadness.
After this traumatizing experience I learned that it would probably be best to stick to places and products that I know are reliable. Amazon is great for certain things like laundry detergent and binders, but not for quality sweatshirts. It all comes down to recognizing a reliable brand, or reading reviews and judging the responses. You want to look for a diverse group of reviews that vary in date and content. If you see that a product has pictures that appear to be stolen from someone’s Instagram, you can also assume that this is not accurate. Reliable brands will make their product pictures uniform and their descriptions clear.
The moral of the story is don’t spend your hard earned money on things without doing a little bit more research. Online shopping is fun, but it’s easy to forget that the things you get are not free. Not only did I buy unnecessary items, I lost money that I could’ve spent on actual clothes. Impulse purchases may seem fun in the moment, but its significantly less exciting when you have to throw away your smelly paper sweatshirts.