Sunday Shopping, Monday Rant

On Friday, the snubnose fell down and scraped a knee while playing in the park. As usual, she played up the drama showing her teeny weeny scratch to everyone she met and basically acting like it was a serious accident. Why am I telling you this? Read on to know more :).

This weekend, our friends wanted to go to the Decathlon Sports Store on Sarjapur Road and invited us to join them for a bit of shopping.

Visiting this store reminded me once again of how the Whitefield area is almost completely NRI-dominated. It’s like a little bit of Americana in India. Just consider the size and structure of the store, it is very similar to the big box stores in USA.

Decathlon (it’s a French company) is a huge warehouse style store containing all kinds of sport equipment – camping, rafting, diving, snorkeling, whatever…you name the sport, they have the equipment for it.

You can also check out this Finishline promo code to help you out if you need some gear!

Us being the couch potatoes that we are really had no use for the majority of the equipment. But, K’s eyes lit up when he saw a whole rack of protective gear to protect children when they are cycling.

We went all the way and picked up everything :). The snubnose was super-thrilled with her new helmet and K was super-thrilled with all the elbow, knee, and wrist guards.

Here is a shot of the snubnose protected to the hilt 🙂

About the store, Decathlon is a pretty good sports store. However, it is a members-only and cash-only store (something along the lines of Metro – another B2B wholesale store).

I was a bit disappointed with the lack of good running shoes. I am wearing out my running shoes, and am really on the lookout for a good replacement. However, this was not the place to look. Don’t come here if you are looking for deals on Reeboks or Nike shoes.

One really good thing I like about the store though is how you can really try out the merchandise before you buy. I could see a lot of children (and even adults) riding the cycles freely throughout the store before committing to a purchase. This is really not something that is allowed in most Indian stores.

Again, the cycles were not a brand that I had heard of (no BSAs or Hero cycles here).

The coolest part were the trampolines in front of the store. The kids had such a blast bouncing away.

And now Comes the Rant:
I wish I could say that I also enjoyed myself. Something about the store bothered me a lot. The quality of the goods were good no doubt, but nothing exceptional, neither was it particularly cheap.

The camping, snorkeling, and diving products were good, and they are not readily available in India, so stocking these products make sense. However, most of the people were buying the generic cycles, which didn’t really make sense to me at all.

Why would anyone buy these cycles? especially when our country manufactures much better ones?? They were not particularly cheap or particularly good. It made me wonder whether we really think about the choices we make before we buy. Are we just blinded by the glamor of big foreign names?

I know friends who go to America and come back with bags full of Made in China stuff from Walmart. Why? I know that I myself have been guilty of mindless shopping many times…but shopping sensibly (and ethically) is something that I have at least been striving for, in the last couple of years or so.

While googling about shopping ethically, I happened on this very neat, really informative Ethical Shopping link, a lot of the information in this site made a lot of sense to me.

And my apologies for the rant…sometimes, I just need to let off a little steam. And what else is a blog for, right? 🙂