2026 January 13 Simplify shopping (and life)

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about re-imagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about shopping, simplification, and maybe life simplification as well. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

This week we're going to talk about making our shopping a little simpler, despite what commercialism tries to force upon us. You've probably been in this situation recently. You go to buy something simple. For me, it was a USB to ethernet adapter, one of these things for an older computer that didn't have an ethernet port, and I was trying to make it work again.

So you do a web search and you enter something into Google, you check out Amazon, and what do you find? Often it's one or 200 choices. Many of which are just relabeled versions of the same item from China. A mishmash of features, few brands you actually know or recognize or have used before, and page after page of useless choices.

It's exhausting and extremely time consuming. Or take the last time I had to rent a car a few weeks ago when miraculously almost all the vendors had almost identical prices. What a lucky coincidence. But then I checked on Travelocity and surprise, there was one vendor who was also on the other sites, but on Travelocity, they were offering the same cars, but ready for this, at about one quarter of the price. I always check Travelocity. And don't even think about trying to figure out the actual cost of a plane ticket, let alone a cell phone or a cell phone plan, or most especially health insurance or Medicaid policies. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

The US in particular makes everything so extremely complex, and it's not by accident. Because when you are given so many choices and hidden specials, you create massive decision fatigue. Which means you probably give up trying to understand what's really being offered and reading all the pages of itsy bitsy fine print for all the details, and finally just make a choice and hope, which often doesn't work out well. But part of that whole cycle is because we're trying to find the best deal, or at least not a horrible deal, and all the major stores use this to their advantage at our cost.

So we present the "Good Enough" method, which is another entirely separate way to approach this. And as you can see, the goal is to get out of decision exhaustion or decision fatigue. No unnecessary fuss. The goal is to get to something that is totally adequate as opposed to optimal or perfect. And while we're talking about this in terms of shopping, it applies to other areas of life as well. A little pre-planning goes a long way to reducing decision fatigue when you may be presented with too many choices in a lot of different things.

So the first step is pretty simple. Do a web search or AI query or however you normally start, but immediately limit the results you choose to investigate. Ideally, you're able to pick a few companies or places that you know and you have used before, that you either trust or at least understand how they're trying to cheat you. And I'm not trying to make that sound really bad. That could be with high shipping costs, hidden fees, whatever. You've worked with them before so you know what to look for.

Now, think about how much you want to spend on this purchase in round numbers. Would you expect it to be under $20? Around a hundred dollars? Whenever you buy anything, even a car or a house, always start with the price in mind. It helps with negotiating and helps keep yourself in check.

Now, check a few offers and see if they're in the price range you expected. There are a few possible outcomes here. Things may turn out to be way cheaper than you expected. Well, that might be yay, but it might be they're doing something sneaky, like high shipping costs, which is very popular on eBay and Etsy. Or perhaps they really are way more expensive than you expected. Well, darn it. Are you sure about your search terms and all those sorts of things? And are any of the items priced like you expected? If everything is way too expensive, then perhaps you just saved yourself a lot of time because you can't afford what you're looking to buy at this particular moment in time.

Notice the difference here. If you didn't start with a budget or price in mind, you'd be tempted to look at all the items that were too expensive and then start looking for the best value out of them. This one's in my favorite color. This one includes a case. And your mind will start to build an argument for why you should buy one of them over the other. But the real decision was that you couldn't afford it right now.

This is part of the reason that stores try to create decision fatigue. At some point, your brain just plain old gets tired and just wants to bring this adventure to a conclusion, and you just buy something. This is one of the big causes of buyer's remorse. You feel good because you ended up getting that $549 latte maker on sale for only $499. Notice what they call price lining, which is when you make a price sound smaller by starting with a lower first digit. It kind of sounds like $400, but essentially it's $500, so it's not even that much of a sale. But when you look at it quickly, you go, wow, it used to be five something. Now it's like in the four hundreds.

The big point is you had a $150 budget. No, don't do it. But you were so annoyed that you went ahead and bought it. Now you have it and you realize it's more than you wanted to spend, so you don't get around to returning it before the return window closes. So now your $150 budget was totally destroyed by a $500 purchase of an item that really wasn't critical.

This scenario is not accidental, which is why we should simplify everything, even our purchasing. And again, remember the Good Enough approach, which is get out of decision exhaustion, no unnecessary fuss. We simplify things, we make them easy, and by following that, we find ourselves in a whole different sort of position.

If you found some things in your price range, well, you already went through and you took out probably a lot of things that were just way too expensive. And it's very interesting. I shop on Amazon, not super frequently, but it's usually for items that I'm pretty familiar with. And very often you'll see things on Amazon and then you see other things priced around it. And then you go to something like Home Depot or Lowe's and the price is like five or $8 less. No special sale, no nothing. Amazon prices are no longer the best on a lot of things, but we've been trained to expect a certain thing, so that's why it's worth trying to narrow things down and then look hard at the price.

But assuming you did find some things in your price range, again, really start narrowing those down to like only two or three items and decide what features or requirements matter. One of my friends said it must be black with silver knobs and play pretty tunes, and those were the requirements for laundry appliances. But that's what mattered to her, and it simplified things tremendously because all those other deals, all those other specials, all those name brand and non-name brand that you hadn't heard of at a really great price, all that stuff just went away. She basically knew two vendors that she was interested in and what features she wanted.

Once you get past that point of narrowing things down and what things are requirements, then take those few items and see if there's any deficiencies you might have missed or differences between them. Just take a quick look at the descriptions, which is usually sufficient because they should usually be pretty similar, and you'll tend to notice if two of them have a feature and the third one does not, and you can kind of narrow things down that way.

Finally, this is super important. Be satisfied with your choice. You finally narrowed it down. Two of them are pretty much the same. This one you decided you'd like better. You bought it. Done. Be satisfied with the choice. The cost of perfection, or its cousin optimal, getting the optimal outcome, is really very high, both in time and effort. Buy what you decided on and enjoy what you got. Don't keep going back to see if the price dropped by a dollar or if something marginally better became available. Second guessing yourself by constantly revisiting things in the past is rarely, almost never productive.

After you do this a few times, this whole process or Good Enough approach, you'll be amazed at how much time you can get back to do more fun things, quite frankly. And it's not like you have to waste a lot of money to make this happen. It's really a matter of just not wasting a lot of time.

In my rental car example, I looked up all the standard offerings from the airlines and the direct rental sites, but then I went to my standby provider, Travelocity. I have experience with them. They often have great deals. I always check them. Same with hotels. There are a few sites I always check, and sometimes it's gotten me a room when other sites, including the hotel itself, said they were sold out. So leverage your own experience.

And honestly, I'm a bit concerned with this whole AI shopping assistance and agents thing. Their goals and your goals are probably not the same, and I would check their results pretty carefully before just clicking a buy button.

So just a simple little tip for tonight. With costs going up in pretty much every department, no matter where you're shopping for whatever you're shopping for, job situations are kind of lagging right now, there's unease in the market, maybe your portfolio is not doing well or whatever, or at least not doing as well as you hoped. A whole bunch of factors. It seemed worthwhile to try and remove a little bit of stress from something that's a pretty common occurrence in our days, which is shopping. The trick works in person as well.

If I'm in a store and the price is not what I expect, I always look online to see if the prices really have gone up or if that particular store is charging a particularly high price. And I will note, I don't go to a store to look at something when I'm planning to buy it online. If I needed to see it first, well, I'm willing to pay a little bit more to support my local store. It costs money to keep things in stock. And like I said, don't forget, this applies to many other areas in our lives as well. Looking for paint colors, how to landscape the yard, where to go on vacation. All these and many other life decisions can be helped with a little pre-planning and setting a few boundaries and requirements.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework is to think about the next thing that you need to purchase, and before you do anything, decide what your budget is or what the expected cost should be, and then what features are essential to you. Extra points if you also do this pre-planning when shopping locally. You probably have an idea what stores are best for what sort of things, whether it's prices, availability, freshness for food, whatever it is. And then when you see a great deal, you'll recognize it. You can lower the stress of always trying to get that perfect deal.

So again, thank you for joining me tonight. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. We have two sites, UKR7.com, which is a site that we put up with links to support people in Ukraine, and WCK.org, World Central Kitchen, which works in disaster areas around the world. Those are both international sites, but there's lots of local charities, and even something as simple as just a smile could change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe and hit that like button. Please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.