Do you hate shopping centres

Post Reply New Topic

Yes........if they are empty!

Great topic for this time of year. The holiday crowds ARE annoying. Buying online is wonderful, and I'm keeping Amazon.com stock up single handedly. Unfortunatley can't get everything that way. Still grocery shopping once a week (30+ years now). Once I located an empty grocery store. No one ever seemed to go there and it was like it was MY store. There would only be maybe 5 other people shopping. Wonderful! Eventually the company closed that location. Very sad.

Have to pick your night carefully to get the one with the least people. If I miss it due to another activity and end up there on a busy night, it's like a nightmare. I will skip entire aisles if there are too many people jammed in them. My shopping is VERY structured, a list made out in order of the aisles from one end to the other. (I can direct anyone to anything in the store). I buy exactly what is on the list and rarely deviate.

I do NOT go in there and then wonder what I should buy. It's amazing to see them all STARING at products like they don't recognize them, blocking the display for minutes on end, then plopping lettuce on top of raw meat on top of laundry detergent. Why would you pick up the fresh/frozen food first and the paper goods last?

Imagine an All-AS store: people walking quietly in lines, no banging into each other with carts or bodies, no talking loudly into cell phones, no music playing. Not having to chat with the clerk (required in USA). No one looking at anyone else. If you spoke out loud to yourself for minute, no one paying any attention! SIGH. That would be heaven to me, no matter how odd it may sound.

I only go into the large department stores at malls, then leave the same way. I see no purpose in walking that crowded hallway.

Unless I have a ipod or a friend with me then I can't stand them

I cheer for the Grinch.

Damn that change of heart at the end!! !

If Aspies are known to be in a world of our own most the time, then how come we get so anxiously distracted to other people? I thought Aspies would be able to be more interested in objects in the shops, especially someone like me. I hate people, and yet I'm always so anxious about them that I always have a complete lack of interest in objects, especially in clothes shops.
I think it might be because I feel I'm being looked at all the time. But then if NTs can shop better than someone like me can, then why would they get so absorbed in me for? Is it just my imagination that they're looking at me, when really they're looking completely the other way?

I just can't seem to take in what I'm looking at when browsing. If I've gone into a shop to get something in particular, I do know what I'm looking at and can take it in more, but when I'm just browsing at things, it always looks false. If I'm with someone when shopping, I always tend to follow closely behind them, and just stop and stand there awkwardly when they stop to look at something, then as soon as they move on again, I move aswell, without looking around too. I am like a carriage on a train.

It's not the lights or smells or even noise what puts me off at all. It's just all the crowds of people moving about, and I hate waiting in queues too because people stand too close to me. I do hate paying in shops aswell, because it's all fingers and thumbs with me. I drop money about, and I feel everybody's watching me pay so that makes me drops things more, and I feel I have to rush because other people are waiting......

The only noise what gets me very anxious in shops is toddlers screaming and crying. It gets me into a very anxious state. Also I get jealous of them, for being allowed to act how they want in public and I've got to keep on a happy NT front all the time, unless I want to humiliate myself - which I don't want to.

Then I get people getting onto me, saying, ''you have all that money saved in your bank and you're not interested in going out and spending it on anything, like most girls your age like doing.....''
Ain't life exhausting!

Hated going to the mall with my family, even when I was a teenager I hated clothes shopping (and I'm a girl!). I'm a bit more cooperative with malls now but there's never anything interesting to look at or even buy anymore. I only like malls where I can run off on my own and if it's a brand new or rarely visited mall I want to explore or whatnot. But more malls these days are popping up with those solicitor booths in the halls where people are constantly approaching you and it gets really annoying.

I dislike the people in shopping centres. I like malls though. I don't like wal mart. It's so bland.

I really hate people touching me so going into any kinda store is a problem for me. I can't walk down Aisle if there are other people in them.

They are okay for me as long as I have my iPod and noise-cancelling headphones. In that case I can escape into my own world. Watching the people is like watching a TV show.

After a while all of the bright lights get to me though. If a store has REALLY bright lighting I don't go in it.

When I was a kid, they did not have Malls, they had department stores. When my mother dragged me along while she was shopping I suffered great annoyance. I could not stand going on a shopping trip then, and I can't stand it now. I only go to a store when I have something specific to get.

With the exception of book store. I like going to book stores to browse and also to libraries to browse and borrow.

ruveyn

If I have to go to a mall I choose the last hour of a weekday night, preferably during a howling snow storm or something, so there would be few people there. Actually since 3 out of 4 people in my family are autistic and DH is shy and anti-social, this strategy makes everybody happy. Sometimes if we forgot and went to a store on saturday everyone is rather tense and don't want to shop.

Absolutely and unless I have someone with me to keep my focus on or headphone in I avoid them. Way, way, way to much going on at once