Why Carrie Bickmore is done with online shopping
“Whatever happened to having a shop assistant tell you how good your butt looks squeezed into an ill-fitting pair of jeans,” The Project co-host asks. “I’m on a mission to bring back old-school shopping.”
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We’ve been told for years that bricks and mortar shops are dead, but I am on a mission to bring back old-school shopping.
The type of spending where you can feel the clothes you are buying and have a shop assistant tell you how good your butt looks squeezed into an ill-fitting pair of jeans.
I realise that I’ll be leading this charge alone given Aussies spend more than $27 billion a year shopping online, but how many of those items are they actually happy with?
I hit peak online shopping addiction when my third child was a few months old.
I would wake up in the morning after a long night breastfeeding, there’d be 50 tabs open on my phone and dozens of items sitting in shopping carts. Many times those items had been mindlessly purchased.
I remember one morning walking to the front door bleary eyed to see the postman standing there with four boxes. “Delivery for Carrie,” he said. “Yes,” I answered with a mix of guilt and confusion.
Low and behold, in my sleep-deprived haze I’d ordered four pairs of the same sneaker in two different sizes. How? Why? Now I had to find the time to go up to the post office and return them all.
Then there was the time I ordered bathers online after being sucked in by an Insta ad — $14.99 per pair. Bargain!
I bought five of them; an interesting move given I hadn’t been out of trackies in months. The bathers arrived and the five pairs needed to be stitched together just to cover my left breast. The bottoms were so small I had to palm them off to my 13-year-old niece.
Nothing ever fits and the effort and expense that’s required to return them is incredibly frustrating.
Even food shopping is fraught with danger. After the birth of our baby, my partner Chris suggested we do our weekly grocery shop online.
Couldn’t be that hard, could it? Everyone else seems to do it. But between the time it took to update my list each week, the delivery delays and the number of items they never seemed to have in stock, it was proving to be a giant pain in the backside.
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My last order I thought I’d bought three squash, but actually ordered three kilos of squash. Now what the hell can you cook with three kilos of squash? It’s a lightweight vegie at the best of times.
There were no beef patties in stock so they were substituted with vegan burgers. I’m guessing a vegetarian packer was trying to send me a message?
And I forgot I already had eggs, so now have 36 eggs to play with. Squash frittata anyone? I am starting to think maybe I am the problem.
So it’s back to the shopping centre I go. If you happen to see a mum with a pram doing laps of the local mall … It’s probably me.
Carrie co-hosts The Project, 6.30pm weeknights on Network 10, and Carrie & Tommy, 3pm weekdays on the Hit Network.