impulse buys cost a girl £1,000 a year

Those little impulse buys cost a girl £1,000 a year

By Daily Mail Reporter

The average woman shopper spends at least £1,000 a year on impulse buys, a poll has discovered.

And if that seems a rather hefty bill for just a few unplanned treats, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg.

A tenth regularly spend £2,500 a year on seemingly irresistible items which ‘caught their eye’ while wandering through the local shopping centre.

Almost every shopping trip ends with an unplanned purchase of some sort, from shoes to DVDs and make-up, the poll suggests.

Two out of three women admit they regularly stray from planned purchases and come home with at least one or more items they hadn’t budgeted for.

Shoes were the most common impulse purchase, followed by DVDs, magazines and clothes.

Household decorations and books were also high on the list.

Seven out of ten women said they had returned from the shops with a pair of ‘impulse’ shoes in the past 12 months.

Five out of ten admitted clothes were their biggest impulse weakness.

A spokesman for OnePoll, which carried out the survey of 2,000 women and their shopping habits, said: ‘It seems millions of women can’t help themselves when they hit the shops.’

Sales were a prime time for impulse buys, with three out of five women admitting they couldn’t help but pick up ­something extra if it was cheap, he added.

A third confessed to buying something unplanned in a sale just so that they could say they had snared a bargain.

Four out of five women admitted buying items in sales which they would never have considered at full price.

The study also found women are far more likely to make an impulse purchase if they were accompanied by friends, who appear to act as ‘enablers’ to an impulse ­shopping fix.

Mothers were also ideal partners in crime, it emerged.

Colleagues were also named and shamed as the perfect ­companions for an impulsive shopping trip.

Unsurprisingly, nine out of ten women said they would not dare to make an impulse ­purchase if they were out with their other halves.

MY THOUGHTS

think of how much money could have been saved without impulse buying. what's worse, i think, is the lack of space and disorder those impulse buys bring into our lives. you don't really need to them. so they would just take space somewhere. and when you finally decide you want to dispose - even that becomes cumbersome.