Is Hating Shopping an Aspie Thing, A Poll

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My daughter hates those beeping gates when people go in and out (to catch shop lifters).

I avoid Amazon because they don't offer an optional 5-minute break for the poor cyborg packing my order. Ordering from China was initially very handy out here far from stores, but then I got a lot of junk, with crazy not-worth-it refund procedures. With the virus around, I get my main grocery store to box up a monthly order, but between us, there are often items to return. I'm trying eBay now, but the US Postal situation is worrisome.

Online shopping

I think most men are hunter-shoppers, while most women are grazer-shoppers.

I know what I want, and I know where to get it; so I'll go to the store, grab the item off the shelf, pay for it, and come home.

My wife knows she wants something; so she'll go to one store, wander the aisles at random, select the items she likes, pays for them, goes to at least one other store where she repeats the process, and then comes home.

No wonder early humans were referred to as "Hunter-Gatherers".

No, because ...

1. Retailers often don't provide enough information on their products, so having people in the store to talk to is useful. For instance, sometimes I need to know whether a certain brand of nail will work in a certain nail gun.

2. One could argue I could get this info from a call center, but I hate being on telephone hotlines even more than I hate walking into a small local store.

I hate shopping, period. Online is better because I don't have the leave the house. I will eat rice and beans for a month before I'll make a grocery store trip. But my husband likes to grab whatever looks good to him that week.

I do use amazon, and I realize I "shouldn't," for many good reasons. I have no excuse. The reasons are it is convenient and I can return what I don't like for any reason within 30 days.

I got burned by a shop in China. I can return the clothes that don't fit, or are not the color or fabric I ordered, but I have to pay to ship them back to China, pay duty on them, and then wait until they approve the return. OR, I can keep everything and get a 15% refund.

Many times, I have carefully planned a project on paper, and gone to the store for the parts. Then I have had to re-do the design in my head to match the parts available that day.
If I were Emperor, there would be no advertising, just honest search engines to find what we decide we want without glamourization. The more ads I see, the more I suspect a bad deal is being pushed. When I was in business, I never paid for ads - I made news instead.

Usually my shopping goals consist solely of getting what I already know I want and getting out of there as quickly as possible, the exceptions being book stores and pet stores.

Can't say I completely hate it, but there's a lot of things I don't like about shopping.

Sometimes the staff turn out to be helpful, honest and courteous. Sometimes the place isn't crowded. Sometimes there's no tacky marketing hype. Sometimes they've got interesting, attractive or useful things for sale. Sometimes they've got the very thing I'm looking for. Sometimes their stuff is logically arranged and it's easy to find what I want. Sometimes they're not playing piped muzak. Sometimes the prices aren't too high. Sometimes the lighting is soothing. Sometimes there's a healthy, relaxing look and feel about the place. Sometimes there aren't any overpaid fatcats calling the shots (they're called worker co-operatives).

But most shops don't check many of those boxes, and they seem to be getting worse. Then there's this virus thing - I don't feel entirely safe in public buildings any more. So I've stopped going into shops. The chances of it being a good experience was never all that great anyway.

As for the OP's question about replacing staff with robots, mostly I don't like the idea. They don't give me a discount for doing the checkout thing myself. It might be slightly better if it's compared with dealing with a checkout person who acts like a jerk, but most of the ones I've dealt with have been OK. They annoy me when they ask me if I've got a loyalty card every damn time, but the robots ask the same question. The machines in the supermarket I go to in the UK are too close together so there isn't enough room to work comfortably. And robots put people out of work, though why anybody would want to work in a supermarket is beyond me. But putting people out of work makes it more of an employers' market, and I want to see an employees' market where the workforce can't be pushed around so easily. Still, I can see the attraction of just using a machine if it's a good one and you know how to work it. And when the carrier bags were free I used to be able to grab a few extra ones to line my waste bins with. I didn't like doing that in front of the staff in case they challenged me. It was also a handy way of getting rid of the loose change I always tended to accumulate. I found the machines would accept unlimited numbers of pennies, and I'd have been reluctant to offer more than the maximum legal tender number to a human cashier in case they wouldn't accept them.

Even when I'm going to the store to buy things, I tend to browse online first.

I like to compare products and shops to see what's available so that I can get the most suitable product at the best price. Sometimes I can take a while to make up my mind on which brand or variant of product to choose, so I prefer to do that at home, and I tend to have an easier time finding what I'm looking for online than if I'm browsing in-store.

I also often feel uncomfortable asking staff for help unless I know exactly what product I'm after, so I'll often only do that as a last resort.

I almost always use self-serve checkouts when I have the option to do so.

So to answer the question, I enjoy buying new things, but I don’t enjoy most of the social interactions that come with shopping, and I don't often enjoy browsing a whole shop full of stuff when I'm not certain that they're going to have what I'm looking for.

I never hated shopping unless it involves bothering me too much or having to deal with too many nuisances.

Heck yes, I tend to stick very long at bookstores and art supply stores.

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I would enjoy shopping on line a lot more if not for all the fraud in the product reviews.

I hate shopping but it has very little to do with the humans behind the counter. More to do with the humans in the shop. Too many crowds and even worse on the streets. And bright lights and music (always bad music, old pop music) playing too loudly. And the clothes I used to try to buy were bad for my sensory issues.

Thank goodness I only wear trackies now cos I'm on esa.