We’ve all been there… going to the city for a bit of light shopping, not wanting to spend too much and knowing we don’t need anything else; we may even claim we’re going to stick to the list. However, when our shiny shoes adorn the cobblestones of Norwich, we see red. Literally, we see red. We see the signs and posters for clearance sales and reductions in clothing stores. Then we believe we are on to a winner – they are reducing the clothes, and we are getting a bargain, trawling through racks and rails for items that we think we need.  

If your excursions are anything like mine, you end up coming home thinking I would never wear this, or the material is static and now I am wearing half of my cat, or the boots don’t fit and are too high heeled.  

The glitter falls off the winning bargains, and they are actually just last season’s trends that were not selling in the stores.  

This also means that we probably won’t end up wearing these clothes. They will sit in our wardrobes until we give them to a friend, or donate them to charity at best, others may bin them, ending up in landfill. Our purses have forked out for useless pieces of clothing that never got to hit the town, and the planet is paying because these non-functional items were never intended to be worn but to be thrown away.  

So next time, you see the glimpses of red on the windows, just remember these sales are more of a ploy to make money, than for your best interests in getting a bargain, and that sometimes these items lose their appeal once buried in the forgotten corner of a wardrobe.  

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