When shopping with others do you go off on your own?

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i get quite frustrated when shopping with my SO as he will randomly disappear. then i spend 20 minutes wandering up and down the aisles of the entire store looking for him. its worse if i am dragging overstimulated kids with me trying to find him.

its all quite fine being an adult, but when you go to a store WITH someone, its rather necessary to know where your group is, and for them to know where you are. what if they get finished and are ready to leave? what if its the mall and they want to go to another store? how will you find them again if they go somewhere else?

simple solution is to just tell the people you are with where you are going, and make arrangements to meet up again. "i need to go to X store, i'll meet you at Y store in 15 minutes." cell phones are great too, unless you are in a giant box store with no reception.

i think part of it has to do with the autistic tendency towards not using greetings, at least for my SO. he does the same thing AT HOME. i can turn around and hes gone, he will have gone upstairs to bed without even saying goodnight.

When I was younger, I got lost many times in shops. Now, I improved my attention so I can follow my parents.

The only times I wander off in a store is when the other people I'm with keep stopping to look at items that aren't on the shopping list (I never go to a store with someone else without a shopping list). So I wander off in search of the items on the list and when I'm finished I wait at the counter. I've done it like this since I was 7.

I like to go on my own to certain stores, but I like to go with my wife to others. I hate clothes shopping by myself, as I have no clue what looks or fits right. My wife is a genius at that, I say what I like, and she can confirm it or show me something else that I like, and that doesn't look like something picked out by the Aspie that I am.

For groceries, I like to go alone. I whiz through the store in 5 minutes flat, as I go to the same one every time, and I know exactly where every item is located. If I go with anyone else, they wander up and down the aisles not having any order or idea of what is wanted... Picking things out and then putting them back when a better one is spotted, and we're in there for an hour smelling fish and listening to out-of-control toddlers screaming.

For other non-regular shopping, such as for appliances or for home improvement items, I like to have my wife with me so as to pick what we both are happy with.

Charles

Depends on who I was shopping with and what for.

Yes! And it drives my wife crazy. To me it just seems an efficient use of time. If I do my own looking while she does hers it will take half the time. Plus, I am frequently not interested in what she's looking at.

I always wander off when shopping with my family. Usually to the exercise section of Walmart or the leotards. In goodwill I keep going back to bathing suit sections or athletic clothes sections to find leotards. Really awkward because I want to call them "leos" and my dad is named lee my parents are divorced and she would call him "leo". So I feel really awkward and want to freak out but then I transmute it and say I can call my leotard collection "leos".

And yes. I wander and then look for my mom, I try to do it without my phone to see if I can psychically find her, and in case my phone dies or I forget to bring it. And in worst cases I use my phone. My mom is never mad at me for wandering off. She says its okay. I didn't realize this was an autistic trait.

Prefer shopping alone or online.

I'm the queen of internet shopping and I can happily wander wherever I want on the net but on the rare occasions I have to go to physical shopping centres, my wandering does cause trouble. So much so my Husband has threatened to put a leash on me I really can't help getting distracted. All the noise, lights and God awful people do my head in and I just kind of end up lost in my own head and before I know it, I've wandered off and he's nowhere in sight.

If I know that we'll get out of the place really fast then I'm perfectly fine with going shopping with other people, but if I know from the start that it'll take a while then I usually just wander off... I mean that makes more sense too if the people shopping together have very different interests and needs, right? Everyone will get out of the place much faster when everyone just goes to the shops they need something from or want to look at instead of having to wait for others when they are in shops that you aren't interested in. Plus, when in a mall no one will get mad for the other for taking too long in one shop if everyone goes off on their own... or about the fact that someone wants to visit a certain shop a few times. That's what usually happens to me; I find something I like but might not necessarily need or if I do, I might hesitate to buy it simply because I wonder if I'll find something similiar from somewhere else with a better price. So I might go to some shops two or three times so that I can compare two products in my mind and see which one I want.

I very seldom go shopping with other people. I have never understood why people feel they have to go shopping in groups. One exception is when I shop for clothes, the one type of shopping I absolutely hate. I need my mom there to help me pick out clothes. But so many of the clothes look like they were made by people with severe vision problems and color blindness who assume all females weigh 85 lbs I just can't keep my feelings about them to myself. My mother doesn't like it when I say how ugly the clothes are, but I feel people have the right to know. She once even said I was worse than my father when it comes to clothes shopping.

And if we aren't clothes shopping I can't seem to help leaving for the toys or crafts department. It's as if a big magnet is pulling me there.

I can do the grocery shopping on my own if I have a list, which I make up in order of where the items appear in the store. I used to do it alphabetically, but then felt compelled to go pick up the items in that order and it took much longer. If I don't have a list, I'll go in for milk and come out with a cart full of things - and forget the milk.

DH usually goes shopping with me, but has learned that he has to stay with me. If he wanders off (okay, that's not fair. He doesn't wander off. I wander off if he stops watching me) it goes badly. Once I notice he's not there I panic. I spin off into thoughts that he wasn't really real, I imagined him from the start. Or worse, that maybe he left me or died years ago and I've only been pretending he was still with me. Then I burst into tears and he has to bundle me back into the car and calm me down.

After that I spend some time wondering why the hell this amazing man is spending his life with a twitchy mess like me.

I wander, just like my parents do. I was always like this - even when I were a little kid.

Our family shopping (assuming we have time, not get in to buy one thing and go out) usually looks like this:

We get in the shop, walk together for a little while.
Someone stops to look at something.
The others go away.
Another one stops, the last one walks away on his/her own.
And every now and then we pass by each other.
- Where is mom/dad? - dad/mom asks me or I ask him/her.
- I don't know / I seen her/him in the xyz area.
Then we separate ways again.
Sometimes one of us will also look for someone else to show him/her something.
Eventually such kind of dialogue starts, during one of the chance meetings:
- Are we going home?
- Sure.
And we go separate ways to look for the missing person. Usually it doesn't take long to get the whole family together again - we are good in finding each other because we know what sections interests who and we keep in check where we seen each other last time - and if we can't find someone we use our cell phones(it usually happens when mom goes inside a changing room, but usually she will let us know she is going there).
Then we go to the register, pay and get in the car.

I was never a "lost child" though as far as I remember. Because it's so natural for my family to separate and then find each other I always knew that if I walk around a little bit, browsing the shelves I will run into my parents eventually. Therefore was no reason to ask strangers for help.

Shopping while staying close to each other in a big shop is boring because we have different interests and we are simply bored in the areas others stop. Mom loves female clothes and the garden, dad likes technical and male clothes section and as for me... I like to walk the whole shop far and wide, rarely stopping in one area for longer.

Can't stand shopping, I avoid it as much as I can, car shopping though is a different story. I could spend all day looking around dealerships.