How Good A Shopper Am I? Conceptualizing Teenage Girls' Perceived Shopping Competence

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2006  by Palan, Kay M

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face=+Italic; Making Independent and Confident Decisionsface=-Italic; - Although informants associated seeking advice from others with competent shoppers, they also indicated that competent shoppers have the ability, or perhaps the confidence, to make decisions on their own. Thus, while a competent shopper might seek advice from others in a decision process, the purchase decision is not totally driven or dependent on that advice. That is, the competent shopper is able to evaluate the advice as one piece of the decision puzzle and still make decisions independently and with confidence.

"If I like something, I ask my friends if they like it. And if they say no, then I would just say, 'Well, I do.' Just because they say that they don't like it doesn't mean that they're going to change my opinion of what I like." (Claire, 14)

"I have a really unique style. Not many people I know wear what I do...when people mature, they stop caring about this stuff. It's cool to be yourself." (Courtney, 13)

"She (my aunt) can just like go into a store, grab the stuff, and be like, 'Uh, the stuff,' and buy it. She is really confident about the things she likes." (Rebecca, 14)

face=+Italic; Managing Moneyface=-Italic; - The ability to spend within one's means is inferred in "making good decisions." But informants also specifically mentioned managing money, in the sense of staying within one's budget, as an indication of a competent shopper.

"Um... I think probably my mom is a good shopper because she knows what she's looking for or most of the time, and she knows there's a certain price range she will not go over and something that's reasonable and can plan ahead a little bit and can say like 'if I can't get this now we'll come back in like a few weeks when you get your next paycheck' or something and then we can buy it, so I just think it's good decision making." (Jen, 14)

"Ok, my boyfriend, Jonathan, he is a very good shopper because he runs on a low budget and his mother is a single working mom and when he gets money it's not like something that happens all the time you know, money to spend on extra stuff, so he'll go to lots of different stores and he's very picky and he has certain tastes so he will decide by examining a lot of different things before he rushes into things." (Alice, 14)

face=+Bold; Areas for Improvement as Competent Shoppersface=-Bold; In order to probe more thoroughly into informants' thoughts about their own competencies and behaviors as shoppers, we asked them to identify aspects of shopping that they believed they needed to improve in order to be more competent as shoppers. As shown in Table 1, four specific themes emerged related to areas of improvement.

face=+Italic; Controlling Impulsive Purchasingface=-Italic; - Something that clearly emerged as a factor concerning many of the informants was their ability, or lack thereof, to control impulsivity; interestingly, the lack of impulsivity was not mentioned as an indicator of shopping competence. Informants seemed to have a fairly simplistic notion of "good" decision making as a rational process, not understanding that "impulsive" reactions in decision making may at times serve very useful purposes (Loewenstein 2000, 2001). As revealed in the following excerpts, impulsive purchasing behaviors are sometimes related to poor money management skills.