Mar
2015
Good day again, oh clever consumer, ye who knows better than anyone, what you need, what you want and what you can and cant have. I will discuss with you, seemingly for the umpteenth time, why and where we must spend our money. You know as well as I do, that not every business, not every product or service is deserving of our hard earned expendable cash and we are not about to simply give it to them. For example, you would consider carefully which of the houses for sale in Woodhill Country Estate, best fit your needs and wants, right? I mean we work and trudge through entirely too much fecal matter up to our necks to unheedingly discard the seemingly disproportionate reward and remuneration, which if it had not been for certain laws and acts, would otherwise be far less!
I believe it natural to want to spend your money primarily on the products and service that appeal to us in a meaningful way, that enhance our lives for the symbolically proportionate value and using this as the sole or conclusive factor in those determinations. I understand that it might be considered frivolous to complicate the buying process with any elements that do not directly factor price per product and utility – at least most people would claim. Yet I believe on numerous other discerning factors in where I spend my money, and who is deserving of this costly trademark of my sweat and tears (blood from time to time, n’est pas?). So what else then do I use as a crucial determining factor of where to spend my money?
There is a mall in a neighborhood I lived in growing up, not fifteen minutes walk from my door to its entrance, called Cheltenham Mall. My mother, sister, uncle and I would frequent the mall, which did in fact vend almost every immediate and not so immediate product we needed during the course of my rapid high school years. We went there for everything – including gas by the way (or should I say petrol), as there was a Sunoco on the premises (that is a popular gas station chain in the United States). The north east coast of the country was and is among the most popularly known regions in the country and the world for malls, shopping centers, and advertising and retail prowess. Approximately twenty – twenty-five minutes away from us was the once upon of time largest mall in the northern hemisphere, King of Prussia mall. An even shorter distance away was the far more posh Plymouth Meeting Mall, which most of my friends and their families preferred for weekend shopping. Why then did we go there so often, opting Cheltenham over the countless better, bigger and more accommodating (in terms of options) malls and shopping centers scattered across the state?
As we visited the mall more and more during out lengthy residence in the adjacent neighborhood of West Oak Lane (some always argued that it was actually East Mt. Airy, I have never agreed), we realized why I would rather spend my money (and my mother’s) at Cheltenham over anywhere else. They began to know who we were. We were recognized by the security, the gas attendance, the store clerks and even other frequent visitors and shoppers. More and more it began to feel as though we were appreciated. Even when we would glide past a store from which we needed nothing, and perhaps had only bought one or two items previously, the shift workers who recognized us would greet us warmly, welcome us in, and/or share a joke or quip about how we do not support their floundering business any longer. These people, to whom we decided to pay for products and services, demonstrated to us that while they certainly had businesses to run, that the cared about us, the consumer, us, the people of the area. For this reason, no matter which mall had more choice, better prices or more elaborate food courts, we returned again and again. Does that not make a difference?
Among the amenities at Woodhill Golf Estate, there are two such adjacent malls only meters away from its stately borders. Parkview Shopping Center could turn out for you to be one such place. With Mr Price, Woolworths, Virgin Active, Clicks and the Barnyard Theatre, you could find yourself going there, more than anywhere else, because all the vendors and shoppers know whom you are, sometimes by name, what you do and what you like. They can grow to care about the value of your business and the quality of your life, in an almost Utopian symbiosis that I wish the entire world could cultivate; that, though, my clever consumer, is rather ambitious and perhaps a conversation for another time.
Spend your money, but spend it where you get value for your money – value in utility, value in service, value in the understanding that neither money nor contentment grow on trees!
