There are many causes for the reason that someone overspends. And the reasons are staring right at us. The availability of food, and other items that stores stock, is temptation staring at us in the face. Indeed, one only has to go back 60 or 70 years, to see the way our shopping trends have changed.
Back then there was nowhere near the amount of foodstuffs, and items that there is now. Indeed, ATMs had not even been invented, and so people spent within their means. In fact, there was very little debt when one looks back to those times. Yes, times were hard – especially during and after the 2nd World War. Yet people were forced to improvise – making use of what little money they had. In fact, with the little money they did have they managed to make go a long way.
Fast-forward to the present day, and 2011, and what do we have? We have a plethora of greed-obsessed shoppers, all grabbing what they can. What is the cause for this? Well one can certainly blame greed and, as human beings, we are all naturally greedy. In fact t is part of our nature to grab what we can when we can. And this ‘trait’ comes out in our shopping habits on the street.
However this is not the only reason for the amount of overspending. One has to look at the rise in ATM cash machines, the spread of supermarkets around the country, undercutting the smaller stores, and the endless line of foodstuffs and other stock. Indeed, the shopper is spoilt for choice with temptations pointing toward him/her at every turn.
Sales here, sales there, and the shopper spends money as if it is going out of fashion. The temptation placed in front of every single one of us, when out shopping, can be too much for many people to resist. They then overspend what they never intended to spend in the first place.
As explained above, this is a mixture of things: greed, the amount of items that are on sale, and ATM cash machines on every corner of the high street. There is no escaping from the fact that the shopper has been – and continues to be – bombarded with temptation at every turn.
The city centre is the cause of the amount of overspending that people do. Of course, no store forces by gunpoint anyone to spend their hard-earned money. But they use weapons of another kind, just as deadly, but silent…until you notice what you have spent, and then it is too late, the damage has been done.
They use the weapons of our own temptation and greed against us. We may not have intended to spend so much on something that we really did not need. We may not have intended to spend so much on food – half of which will probably be wasted. But the point is…we did. And it is for this reason that personal debt has now spiralled out off control.
Until we can control our own greed, then shops and banks will continue to use our own greed against us – tempting us with special offers of sales for this, or sales for that. Indeed, how can we possibly resist? The causes of overspending are many, but the answer lies within ourselves…and within the shops and financial institutions who know our weaknesses, use them against us, and who continue to tempt us to spend…