Forget buying just browse and use!

"You can touch... you can play... if you can say I'm always yours." So goes the popular I'm a Barbie Girl number. For all the puns and insinuations intended in the song, for a moment just imagine Barbie did not say these words to Ken... rather picture somebody said them to you! Er, please calm down... maybe a shopkeeper is trying to tell you something. Yes, wohi dukaandaar who has caught you (okay if not you then many like you) drooling over a particular something and has even reprimanded you for getting a wee bit more up, close and personal with the stuff that you touch, play with but in the end forget to say its yours! Window shopping or timepass for you but a pain for the men and women managing the show behind the window! Narrates a sales boy of a well-known music shop in Sector 17, "Some people come to the music store only to hear music on the listening posts. They never buy the album but just listen to the songs until they get tired of them. This causes inconvenience to genuine buyers." Familiar stuff... and if we are honest we'll admit we've also been party to this sometime or the other. As college student Jatin Dhiman admits, "I remember the book Oliver's Story by Erich Segal, which is a sequel to Love Story. My friends told me that the book is okay to flip through but not to buy so I went around different bookstores, read a portion here and there and without even paying a penny for it, I'd read the whole book!" And kya kehna to girls like Priya and Harpreet who confess going to different stores just to try out (never to buy, mind you) new stuff like perfumes, T-shirts and lippers. "Sometimes when we have to go to a party, we go to one of the shops and try out the perfume kept for trial. It's like having fun on somebody else's expense," declare the duo who have done much more daring window shopping adventures. What's interesting to note is that shopkeepers are not fooled rather know "the types" well as Ajay Arora, proprietor, Capital Book Depot says, "One comes across these kind of people all the time. We've also started recognising the types who'll just come, flip through books, read a bit and never buy. Mostly joke books and quotation books are the ones which browsers read at one go while standing in the shop itself." Oops!