Some Symptoms and Causes of Shopping Addiction
Not long ago I picked up a paperback called Shopping Addiction by Caesar Lincoln. The author makes a few observations that stuck with me. If you suspect you have a problem with spending, or you're watching somebody close to you struggle with it, some of what follows might ring true.
At the center of it is a loss of control over money. The reasons differ from person to person. For some, the spending itself delivers a rush, and that rush gets tangled up with wanting an audience: look how much I can afford to drop on this thing. Other times the compulsive shopper grabs a random item off a shelf purely for the small jolt of buying it. Put that person in a position where money can be spent and restraint tends to evaporate. The budget rarely enters into it. Most compulsive shoppers, in fact, either keep no budget at all or hand control of one to someone else.
Collectors are their own category. The pull is strongest when something rare surfaces, usually at a steep price, and it has to join the collection. I lived this with my first husband. We collected colored antique pressed glass, and I still have pieces packed away in boxes because I ran out of shelf space to show them. By my second marriage I can count on one hand the things I bought for any collection: two items, maybe. These days I steer that same urge toward second-hand stores and resale shops instead.
A childhood short on extras can plant the seed. The rent gets paid and the basic bills get covered, but the little luxuries almost never appear. That was more or less my situation growing up. Our household budget left no room for frills, so store-bought clothes lost out to homemade ones, and I used to imagine a day when I could just walk in and pay full price without waiting for a sale. The irony is that I overcorrected. I've bought far more than I can wear, mostly clothes on sale, until my dressers overflowed and the extras ended up stuffed into plastic totes. Buying online meant I never tried anything on, and returning what didn't flatter me or fit felt like too much hassle, so it piled up. Letting go of clothes is just as hard for me, even the ones that don't work. Trying things on and building actual outfits would have served me far better.
The habit extends to bargains stockpiled for the house. Ask yourself how many paper towels a single household can plausibly go through in six months, or a year. Spelled out in my own words, here are the reasons the book points to. Shopping addiction breeds clutter, and clutter can tip into hoarding. There's often an attempt to buy other people's admiration, whether through status items for yourself, spending on others that you can't really afford, or giving away things that are costly and hard to replace. It strains relationships, too. I know of one couple who, in their first marriages, each played opposite roles, one the spender and one the keeper of the budget. When they remarried, they somehow swapped those roles, and money turned into something they fought over for control. That it repeated in a second marriage struck me as almost comic.
Twelve-step support does exist for people who overspend, though the meetings cluster in bigger cities. Debtors Anonymous is the group to search for online if you want to find one near you.