"Shop Till You're Old, Learn Till You're Old": Are You One of the Young People Spending Their 10,000 Hours on Shopping?

The "10,000-hour rule" says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a field. And no, we don't mean anything as simple as comparison shopping.

Honestly, the most serious you ever get these days is probably in the moments before you buy something —

To buy a bag you wouldn't be embarrassed to carry, you read the recommendations of seven or eight WeChat official accounts and studied countless outfits on Kendall Jenner, Xiao Zhanzhan, Guomei and Olivia Palermo, before finally putting this season's it bag on the list for your overseas shopping agent;

To buy a washing machine, you sat down and worked out what top-load agitator, front-load drum, washer-dryer combo, lint box and dryer stacking kit actually mean;

In the idle stretches of slacking off at work, you read the answers with more than 10,000 upvotes on the Zhihu threads "What are the best snacks to eat at the office" and "What snacks do you wish you'd found sooner," plus the exhaustive review posts from food accounts, before you dared drop those crowd-approved, internet-famous snacks into your cart;

……

We once joked in the QDaily Dictionary that the "10,000-hour rule" says becoming an expert in any field takes 10,000 hours of practice — but the skill today's young people are most likely to master may well be "10,000 hours of shopping."

Ten thousand hours of repetitive practice sounds dreary. Ten thousand hours of shopping sounds like fun.

For one thing, the homework is part of shopping itself (what to buy, whether to buy it and where to buy it all take research). For another, the seriousness people bring to that research is itself a pleasure (a theorem: whatever you do while slacking off at work is usually the thing that makes you happiest).

The old way of shopping — ask nothing, just hand over the money — is out of fashion.

Taiwanese media once coined a name for a type of consumer: the "smart indulgers," people who love researching purchases and gather their consumer information online. They are young, willing to spend, and won't casually grab something off a shelf they have never heard of. Today's young people would rather research every side of a product first, calling on everything they know to pick each item.

The effort is so earnest, and so effective, that shopping homework has become one of the main ways people now pick up new knowledge.

Think about it: apart from the skills you have banked for work, most of the new terms you have learned lately probably came from homework you did before buying something. To buy a television, you finally got clear on refresh rate and color bit depth. Before that, the last time you met a chemistry term was in high school; the most recent time was comparing soap-based and amino-acid-based facial cleansers……

The QDaily Research Lab has run some surveys and observations on young people picking up new knowledge through shopping. We tried to work out what exactly people are doing when they do their shopping homework, and why they spend so much time researching what to buy.

Here is what we found:

Where do the 10,000 hours of "10,000 hours of shopping" actually go?

1. Seeing past the surface to the substance, with professionals as your guide — closing the information gap

For ordinary people, understanding chemistry class at school was no help at all in reading an ingredient list years later. So you had no choice but to believe whatever brand marketing hyped, and to trust the white-coated experts in television commercials.

Now chemists and biologists are happy to share plain-language guides like "choosing skincare by ingredient," so an ordinary shopper can spend a little time and learn what the silicones in shampoo do, or what niacinamide and salicylic acid do in skincare — and can often turn the tables on the beauty advisor at the counter.

It is the same with investing or buying insurance: 10,000-hour shoppers find the beginner's explainers online far clearer than any economics course they took, and no longer have to sit through baffling sales pitches.

2. Too much dazzling choice — you have to understand a product before you can choose one

In a QDaily Research Lab poll on "what consumption upgrades did you try this year," "replacing a regular toothbrush with an electric one" drew the most votes. But before you buy an electric toothbrush you need to know what separates "sonic" from "rotary," and whether a "sensitive mode" is really necessary. Buying a washing machine: top-load agitator or front-load drum, a washer-dryer combo or a washer and a dryer bought separately? If one brand's robot vacuum costs two or three times as much as another's, where is the technology, or is it just the brand's markup? People say a mechanical keyboard is a big step up from an ordinary one — so beyond color, what is the difference between black, yellow and red switches, and which should you buy?

To land the product that best fits their needs at the best value, 10,000-hour shoppers will spend enormous amounts of time on all of the above.

3. Purchases that used to take some expertise now come with guides

Call it posturing, call it cultivating taste: the finer habits imported from the West keep spreading. Young people today are willing to spend time on beginner guides and courses in wine and coffee. To move product, e-commerce platforms and shopping-guide sites publish exhaustive, solicitous tutorials on how to enjoy food and drink, teaching shoppers to tell the tannic structure of a wine from its notes of fruit, leather and wood. And while picking out coffee beans, the 10,000-hour shopper learns about roasting and botanical terms, and picks up some South American and African history and geography along the way.

4. As industries and products split into ever finer niches, plenty of people become experts in their own corner

You get inexplicably hooked on breaking in a pair of raw denim jeans and learn a great deal about cloth, weaving and fiber; you play with a DSLR or a Leica and pick up a fair amount of optics…… Because of that splitting, "every trade is a world of its own" now applies to consumption as well: every new money pit you fall into comes with a body of new knowledge.

5. Not wanting to miss a single change in lifestyle or trend

This year's colors, this year's fabrics, the shoes you most need this spring: fashion magazines used to give you only the rough outline. Now every sort of styling advice offers exactly the detailed guidance you were hoping for — "The mules you need this spring and summer: we've picked them for you," or even "Cold drinks made to match the Pantone colors: we've written the recipe for you."

Besides, there are far too many trends to keep up with now. Beyond clothes and food, a 10,000-hour shopper will go to dedicated forums and magazines to study something as niche as shifting fashions in houseplants — and to build a stylish indoor garden, will throw out last year's fiddle-leaf fig, kept half alive all this time, and replace it with a newly bought night-blooming cereus.

6. Even the "self-management" methods that make you efficient are worth poring over

To use their time better, modern people lean more and more on time-management and self-management skills, and tools like GTD apps and mind maps take some learning. These complicated apps, tools and courses — which demand a lot of time to learn and a rebuild of your whole task-management system — also appeal to young people. They buy into "a better you" marketing, and are glad to spend time sharpening the axe before cutting the wood.

Why are learning and shopping growing so close?

7. After the consumption upgrade, there is more to research

Ever finer product categories, and an endless supply of new gimmicks and new trends, keep expanding what people know about any one category of goods. Every time you think "so this exists too" or "so you can do it that way too," it means you need to spend time learning more before you can find the thing that fits you best.

8. Merchants feed the hunger for knowledge as readily as the hunger to shop

As consumption upgrades, so does information. The clearest sign is that there is simply more shopping-guide content: recommendations and reviews for single product categories, covering young people with all sorts of different spending habits. When shopping platforms turn themselves into content — Taobao's "Second Floor," for instance — they are answering a real need among young people: do the homework for me. The "internet-famous items" hyped and popularized every few days are another product of that homework; in many conversations, knowing about them is how you show you are ahead of the curve.

9. Faced with more and more goods and more and more information, only homework keeps you from being taken in

Relatively speaking, young people are harder to fool with a merchant's "playbook," and less willing to waste money. In an earlier QDaily Research Lab survey asking "what bothers you about the consumption upgrade," the option with the most votes was "You have to read reviews before buying anything. It's a hassle, but skip it and you end up with something useless." They care about which feature of a slightly complicated product is worth how much, and which channel sells the same product for the best price. For categories they have never tried, they are especially careful, often asking every friend they have and waiting for several "I've used it, it's good" verdicts before they relax.

10. Finding a sense of achievement in fragmented learning

In an earlier article on the middle-classing of young people's consumption, we noted that one mark of middle-class spending is a passion for "researching consumption." Cutting fat and building muscle scientifically, picking the running shoe that suits the shape of your foot, working out what counts as organic food…… Researching consumption, a subject as close to home as it gets, calls for knowledge of physics, chemistry, geography, economics and more. Shopping homework has become an important way for young people to pick up new knowledge — after they leave school, most of what they learn has to do with how to spend money.

Learning how to shop can also genuinely save money: comparing prices to find the cheapest flight, or finding the credit card that suits you best and squeezing the most out of its points. The realization that "I really am someone who knows how to spend money" brings its own sense of achievement.

What else marks out the spending of the "studious shopaholic"?

11. The more time you spend, the more money you spend

In our poll on the frustrations of the consumption upgrade, the second most popular option was "money is easy to spend and hard to earn." It is true that buying something out of nowhere, with no homework at all, barely happens anymore — but the more detailed the information you gather, the more likely you are to splurge. The Google report we mentioned at the start also drew a link between three traits — searching more, buying better and spending more: loving to research your purchases means being willing to put more thought into the quality of your life.

The more time you spend researching, the more you find that "there are so many brands I'd never heard of that I love!" Young people certainly use their shopping homework to detox, too, to pull a craving up by the roots — but once one craving is pulled up, a pricier one usually grows in its place.

12. Losing interest in buying things in physical stores

It is not entirely about price or convenience, and it is not that they dislike shopping as an experience. It is that "the brands and products I saw online aren't in the store."

13. Loving to plant cravings, and to have them planted on you

Guokr, Zhihu and WeChat Moments all double as shopping-guide sites. People bookmark product recommendations across every sort of forum and platform, even with no need for the thing right now, on the theory that "it'll come in handy one day." The trouble is information overload: when the day comes, remembering it or finding it again can be a chore. And everyone gets lazy sometimes — scrolling a review post straight to the bottom for the verdict, skipping the long argument in the middle.

14. Treating buying presents as an exam too

The subjects include "what to buy for your parents," "what to give a close friend who's getting married" and "gift lists for babies aged 0 to 4." They take pride in a present that draws compliments, and they like buying their parents things "their parents wouldn't know to buy."

15. Mass-market goods lose their appeal, while niche brands arrive as a form of "new knowledge"

Young people who have seen a lot of shopping-guide content are increasingly inclined to sift and judge that content itself. In a poll we ran called "What words in an online shopping recommendation would even halfway make you click these days?", the line people bought into most was of the type "Niche series: the little-known tool that raises the elegance of your shower," which took 17.5% of the votes.

On the whole, whether you put it as "do your homework carefully before you buy anything" or "you pick up new knowledge in the course of buying things," learning and shopping have never been so closely tied.

The "10,000-hour shopper," or "studious shopaholic," is glad to spend hours on end working out how to buy things, and the information gathered on the way often becomes fresh material for conversation with friends. Knowing how to spend money is a new kind of virtue. On the same budget, they would rather do the homework and eat the most authentic version of a dish than make a blunt decision on the assumption that the expensive thing must taste better.

At bottom, that sense of achievement comes from spending the same money better, on something of higher quality. The 10,000 hours they spend researching what to buy are also hours spent becoming someone who knows how to spend money — which they find both worthwhile and a pleasure.

Cover image and illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao

The QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for questions about all kinds of lifestyles. It may look at a change or a trend in how people live, or at one brand's service. Here you can vote, vent and take a stand.