>I don't know that I totally agree with you. I do go buying sometimes, when I know exactly what I want and go to get it. OTOH, sometimes I need something to fill a need, but don't know exactly what. The thing could be a dress to wear to an event, a pair of shoes to go with a dress, a gift, something to make for dinner, or any of a number of other things. Then I shop to find what I need at a price I'm willing to pay.

That's shopping, which is quite OK. It applies to stuff that take less time to browse through a rack in the shop than it would take to find on the web - and where you can't really judge the quality by a digital image. The picture on the web can be taken under special light, by a pro photographer who could make last year's potato look alluring, and it would not show bad stitches.

I agree, there are times when one has to go shopping, and the rest of the time one goes and buys. It's not a matter of exclusion, but rather one of proportion: how many of each. In our case, it's about 1:10 to 1:40, i.e. out of eleven (up to 41) things we buy, one may be a result of "let's see what they offer", while the rest were premeditated.

We're probably still a quite non-consumer family. We don't believe in shopping as therapy. We may be buying a lot of what everyone else buys, but not so often. And then there are a few items that we never buy, like sugar water, fake cheese, ready fried chicken, pink shoes, bulky armchairs, triple and quad razor blades, lite beer, fake worn-out clothes, big TVs, any content by Hollywood and/or Disney, any books on how to get rich, any barbecue starter fluid (it stinks - how can anyone eat after that is beyond me), salted butter, cake mixes, anything spectator sport related, bumper stickers, and of course, there's no way I'll ever buy an SUV, truck or any other personal tank.