Retail therapy - is not a therapy - it's a disease in itself that needs to be cured

Indulge in retail therapy today – said the day’s horoscope. This line caught my attention.

What does this mean? Is it possible to “indulge” in a “therapy”? So I looked up the dictionary to understand the meanings of these two words.

Therapy means treatment of physical, mental or social disorders or disease

To indulge means to satisfy a desire or to allow someone to have what one wants. To indulge also means to pamper or to spoil. The latter is the more popular among all usages of the term.

Going by the above, if someone wants to indulge, the chances are that therapy may be needed to stop him / her from indulgence.

In the last few years, this term “retail therapy” has been quite popular. It is promoted as a “stress buster”. So what is retail therapy?

Wikipedia defines “retail therapy” as under:

Retail therapy is shopping with the primary purpose of improving the buyer's mood or disposition. Often seen in people during periods of depression or transition, it is normally a short-lived habit. Items purchased during periods of retail therapy are sometimes referred to as "comfort buys".

Retail therapy was first used as a term in the 1980s with the first reference being this sentence in the Chicago Tribune of Christmas Eve 1986: "We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy."

To put it another way, it is a way to indulge oneself into the act of shopping without feeling guilty about it. Or it is a way of separating one from one’s money minus the guilt associated with it, till the credit card company sends the bill.

We all indulge in shopping once in a while, but to use it to lift one’s mood – well, think about it. I read some of the usages of the phrase on the Internet, and was shocked. Here are a few samples:

·      My boyfriend dumped me. I went for retail therapy and felt better.

·      I failed in the college exam. I need some retail therapy.

·      Nothing beats spending money to forget about your troubles.

Beats me, at least.

All these examples are about curing the symptom called “bad mood” and not curing the problem – not even addressing the real problem. This is not a great insight – this is as clear as the sunshine.

Retail therapy, in my understanding, is a term coined by some smart marketers to keep their cash registers clinking. As mentioned earlier, it is a way to make consumers spend more without feeling guilty about it.

This is not to suggest that you should not spend. It is your money, after all. Spend your money the way you want. If you want to splurge, nobody should stop you. However, just be honest to yourself. Call is splurging, call it indulgence, call it spending, call it by any such name; just don’t give it the name of therapy to fool yourself and everybody around you.

This could turn out to be a trap and the pains would be felt later – sometime much later, either when the bills come or when the retirement corpus is insufficient.

Retail therapy is not a therapy. It's a disease in itself that needs therapy.

Happy shopping this festive season!

-       Amit Trivedi 

Is India fast becoming a seller’s nation?

We all have heard the great India story – one billion customers, growing wealth, increasing income, even faster increasing spending. Wow! How the hungry Indians have transformed into hungry for more! This is probably the biggest developments of the 21^st Century. But this development seems to have come with something else. We are fast becoming a seller’s country.

I will share some specific experiences and for that I will need to take names. I can’t help it as real experiences have real companies with real names.

The other day, I had gone to pay my Reliance phone bills and I complained about frequent call drops. The response was very “matter-of-fact” – the person at the counter coolly told me, “Yes sir, GSM phones have that problem.” I also mentioned about the speed of internet connection (I have a wireless broadband connection), that in spite of having a broadband connection, I get the speed of a dial-up network. The guy was quick to seize the moment. He suggested I go for an upgrade to the newly launched 3G connection by paying only Rs. 2,600. He assured me that this connection can get faster speed.

This response prompted me to write this article.

These guys are trained to sell. Their performance is also measured in terms of sales numbers and not in terms of customer happiness or satisfaction. If you have a complaint, it will be logged into the system and then at a later date and time someone will get in touch.

The other leading mobile phone service provider – Airtel – is even better than Reliance. First of all, I have been a slave to the number that my erstwhile employer had allotted to me. So many people know this number; I cannot afford to change it. This is what the cell phone companies are banking on, probably. To their respite, the regulator also accommodated their lobbying (sorry to use this much-maligned word) long enough to introduce MNP (mobile number portability). My experiences with Airtel services are known to many of my friends and if I start writing all those experiences, it may turn out to be a small book. I would only like to narrate what is relevant to this article.

1. Go to www.airtel.in and what you’ll find is: if you are a customer with a problem and you want to find where and whom to contact, you will surf through the site and as the Ariel detergent ad says, “dhoondte reh jaaoge.” However, if you are an investor, you can simply click on a link right at the top of the home page. A single click on that link and you will be greeted by Mr. Mittal himself. The company is candid in telling us where the priorities are.

2. I lodged a request for starting voice mail services. Nothing happened for some time. On repeated follow ups, I was told that there is some technical glitch and company’s engineers are working to resolve that. After around 3 months, finally I was told that they do not offer voice mail services in Mumbai. With that I understood that the chapter was closed. One fine day, I receive a message that I had a message in my voice mailbox. Now, this is how I got to know that the service had started and that I was a privileged one to get it.

Tata AIG General insurance takes the cake. I had an insurance policy, which was renewed. I found that the renewal premium was higher by Rs. 3 from the previous year. Now, that surprised me. What the company had done was a stroke of ingenuity (however unethical it may be). They adjusted the base premium upwards such that the gross amount after Service Tax was almost the same as the last year, when the service tax was reduced from 12.36% to 10.30%. This 2.06% of service tax benefit was comfortably absorbed by the firm, without any notice to policy holders. When I followed up with the firm, the officers replied that they are free to revise the renewal premium without any notice to the policy holders. They agreed that they might have sent renewal notices with the old premia rates, but they were sorry about it (such a lovely word, this sorry is). I also got a written reply to my written complaint, where the officer started with "Let us explain ..." followed with no explanation whatsoever. A wonderful practical joke. Nevertheless, I had no time to follow up then and I gave up. When a year passed and the next renewal date came up, the call centre (sales) executives were quick to call up for renewal reminders. When I kept asking them about the status of my complaint, the calls stopped but were replaced with SMS messages that said, "we are unable to reach you ...". Someone had a very nice process of sending SMS when the customer is not available through phone, but the system was abused in case where the customer was insisting about resolving a pending issue.

I can go on and on, but let me not bore you with the details. I have such experiences with Nokia, HP, Dell, RCI, and HDFC; to name a few. When I share the experiences with my friends, I get to know they also have such issues.

What is surprising in almost all these cases is that the number of sales outlets is extremely high but the services centres are very few. The sales outlets are right on main roads, the service centres – you guessed it right, or maybe you already knew – very far off and generally off the main roads.

Is it suggesting something? Even at the cost of sounding too negative, I think, there is a message: dear customer, these companies seduce you as long as you are a prospective customer. The moment you purchase the product or service, you are not exciting.

In the process of getting more of everything and getting everything now, dear customer, you have lost a very powerful weapon of self-defense you had – choice. And the companies know that.

Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year will always be in short supply.

Whoever said “customer is king” was dead right. Look at the kings in the democracy – by the way, I am referring to the erstwhile kings and not the Hindi of the word King (Raja).

Devil's innovations

My friend and a leading financial planner Gaurav Mashruwala loves to share a joke.
Once a news reporter interviewed the Devil. After a long interview, the reporter finally asked, “What is that one thing you did that makes you proud?” The Devil tried to circumvent the question and started giving round about answers, but such questions in superlatives (best, biggest, largest, etc.) are the most favourite among the reporters. He insisted and finally the Devil replied, “The nastiest thing that I ever created is the credit card. It has the potential to ruin many families. Before the inevitable comes, they feel happy using it.”
That’s the innovation called credit cards.
Gaurav’s joke ends here. So let’s start ours.
The news channel carried a story about the Devil’s interview. There were public debates about the interview and the merits and demerits of credit cards. Someone brought out a very interesting point. They said, the Devil did not think much as those sinners who do not have credit cards are spared of the punishment.
The Devil was requested to come for another interview. He obliged. In fact, he could not resist the temptation of the publicity that television gave him.
After a few questions, the interviewer came to the point and asked the Devil (referring to the credit card answer) that the same spared those sinners who do not have a credit card. That way, it fails the test to qualify as your best idea. What do you have in such a case? The Devil’s answer was very simple, “Ever heard of tele-calling? That is for those who do not have a credit card yet.”
Well, the amount of outbound calls are done by the tele-callers is increasing by the day. Time has come for the regulators to introduce “Please call” registry instead of “Do not call” registry as the same does not work. It also involves painful steps in registration, a wait period of 45 days (I fail to understand why that should take 45 days. What do the phone companies do in the wait period? Or is it the proverbial “last chance” for the tele-marketers?). If you get a call after the wait period is over, lodging a complaint is another ordeal. You, the harassed, need to remember the steps to lodge a complaint. How some people can make life more and more difficult – is a puzzle.
The icing on the cake is the attitude of the tele-marketers. The caller thinks that he or she is doing a huge favour to you by selecting to call you. God save us from such Devilish innovations.