Stephanie Waddell loves to shop. “I love to go out and look,” she says. The 27-year-old Chicagoan, who designs handbags, acknowledges to indulging in retail therapy at times. “I definitely do that, whether it’s buying myself candy or something much larger,” Waddell says.
Meredith Meserow loves to shop. “I like to go once or twice a week,” says Meserow, ticking off Barneys, Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus as her favorite haunts. A self-described “former chubbette,” Meserow, now 50, buys clothes to reward herself for maintaining a size 8 figure. “I need all the reinforcement I can get about staying fit and in shape,” she says.
Shara Alexander loves to shop. “I get the deals, it makes me feel good,” says the 29-year-old New Yorker. In 2001, Alexander shopped until she dropped nearly $8,000, a sum hardly bearable on a young publicist’s salary. But she shopped, she says, rather than contend with an unhappy living situation.
Waddell and Meserow are like the tens of millions of American women for whom shopping is a pleasurable pastime, one that can occasionally go overboard but is on the whole controllable. Alexander, though, is more like the 13.5 million American women (and
1.5 million men) who suffer from oniomania, or an addiction to shopping, according to estimates by the American Psychological Association.
Compulsive shopping is a disorder that almost exclusively affects women, says Dr. Donald Black, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa whose studies on Americans’ obsession with acquiring things have been widely cited.
Although not as dire as a dependency on alcohol or drugs, compulsive shopping can still derail a woman’s life, with serious cases resulting in fractured relationships, financial woes and even bankruptcy.
Karyn Bosnak, a 29-year-old New Yorker, indulged a fondness for Gucci and Prada until she racked up a $20,000 debt. The world wouldn’t know it, except that Bosnak decided to beg for the money on a Web site she created (www.savekaryn.com). Apparently the world felt her pain; late last year she had racked up enough donations to pay her debts. Bosnak did not respond to requests for an interview.
Shopaholics exhibit several characteristics. They buy things they don’t need. They stockpile their purchases, sometimes buying dozens of the same item just because it’s on sale. “I have bags of stuff with the tags still on, just sitting there looking at me,” Alexander says.
Addicts tend to scratch their shopping itch with clothes, though household items and electronics can count as binge items as well.
“People have different things that make them feel good,” says Martha Heineman Pieper, a Chicago-based psychotherapist and author of “Addicted to Unhappiness” (McGraw Hill, $21.95).
Shopaholics aren’t drawn so much to shopping as they are to owning things, Pieper explains. For these people, material things have taken the place of love and affection, “and that need usually stems from a childhood bereft of affection,” she says. “Having stuff was a way to feel better.”
The American fixation on material goods fuels shopping disorders, says Sharon Durling, a Chicago-based financial writer and author of the upcoming “A Girl and Her Money” (W Publishing, $13.99). “It’s more of a problem here than elsewhere because it’s just not an issue in countries that aren’t that wealthy,” Durling says.
Here, the importance of shopping, both to the economy and the national psyche (remember how we were all urged to go out and buy stuff after Sept. 11?), has spawned an industry called “shopology.” Its practitioners study stores to find out which layouts, merchandising tricks, lighting plans and other store attributes encourage shopping.
Season of excess
Paco Underhill, author of “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” (Dimensions Books, $25), and president of New York-based Envirosell Inc., is perhaps the best-known shopologist. In his book he identified what he calls the “butt brush”–the unwelcome tendency of people’s rear ends to meet in too-narrow aisles. Observations like that prompt Underhill’s clients to spend millions redesigning their stores.
It seems natural that the holiday season, which encourages excess in all things, would pose problems for addictive shoppers. It does, but not in the way one would expect.
“The holidays are bad because shopping addicts can’t stand to give things away,” says Pieper. “So when they buy for someone else, they also buy for themselves.”
As is the case with most destructive habits, beating a shopping addiction is not nearly as easy as developing one. Durling likens the recovery course to that of a 12-step program, with the first steps being acknowledging the problem and the inability to overcome it on one’s own.
“That’s the hardest thing,” Durling says. “Nothing will be enough for you to overcome it on your own; you’ve got to realize you’re out of control.”
Both she and Pieper suggest enlisting friends to help tame the habit. Friends who become shopping chaperones can help an addict stop after she has purchased what she needs; they also can be called upon to go out for a walk, a cup of coffee–anything but a trip to the mall.
Take charge
After that, controlling the habit means practicing sound financial management, Durling says. “Know where you are financially,” she advises. She tells women to do what she does: Carry around a brightly colored index card on which she records the place and amount of every credit card purchase, even if it’s $5 for gas.
Alexander offers her own bit of financial advice: Don’t just cut up your credit cards; call the stores and close all your accounts.
“If you cut up the card, your account is still active and you can get another card,” she explains. “But by closing the account, you’re in charge and you’re taking the step, and that’s the best way to do it.”
Closing her accounts helped Alexander overcome her addiction, but she gives most of the credit to counseling sessions that made her realize just how miserable she was in her living situation. In August, Alexander moved out and since then she has cut back drastically on shopping.
“I still like clothes and shoes but I’m a lot smarter now,” she says. “Knowing you can get yourself in trouble that way, and have bills pile up and worry about not having any money–I don’t think I’ll ever get back in that situation again.”
Are you a compulsive shopper?
Financial counselor Sharon Durling suggests asking yourself the following:
1. I typically return one out of five of my purchases to the store.
2. I have lied about my purchases or their costs to my spouse, friends or colleagues.
3. My overspending has caused me to experience guilt, insomnia, fatigue and a sense of hopelessness.
4. I can correlate my overspending with overeating.
5. I am having trouble making ends meet and keeping creditors at bay.
6. I often turn to shopping as the antidote to feeling bored, lonely, angry or frustrated.
7. When I go shopping, I never return home empty-handed.
8. I find myself lying to my creditors to obtain new credit lines.
9. My shopping habits have interfered with my work.
10. My spending has caused problems in my marriage or my primary relationship.
11. I feel uneasy if I have not shopped in a week or more.
12. I find myself repeatedly resolving not to spend, only to relapse and binge shop.
Total your Yes responses.
If your score is: 1-4: You have an indicator or two that trouble could be brewing, but you are hip to your issues and in a strong position to keep a check on things.
5-8: Congratulations on acknowledging you are imperfect! However, you are within shouting distance of the slippery slope.
9-12: Red alert. OK, things are a bit out of control, but now is no time to berate yourself. Chin up. Deep breath. Got to kick in some action because your previous attempts at control aren’t working. Go to www.debtorsanonymous.org. Relief is only a meeting away.
–Lisa Bertagnoli
Enabled by Internet
For shopping addicts, buying online is like plowing through a box of candy in the middle of the night: If nobody sees you, it doesn’t count, right?
Wrong. Just as those chocolate calories count, Internet purchases can and do fuel shopping addictions, and perhaps create new ones.
“It makes it so easy to go overboard, and I think that’s happening,” said Sharon Durling, a Chicago-based financial counselor. “If someone’s on the fence, the Internet might just tip them over.”
The same reasoning applies to other Internet vices, such as pornography and gambling, Durling points out.
Aside from making shopping hassle-free (no crowds or parking lots to contend with), the Internet also offers anonymity, a boon for those trying to mask their habits. According to a 2001 study done by the Center for Online Addiction (www.netaddiction.com), 83 percent of the center’s clients said that anonymity was the Internet’s biggest draw.
That was the case with tennis star Serena Williams, who in 2001 acknowledged she would spend as many as six hours a day online, buying thousands of dollars worth of clothes and accessories. Williams, who liked to shop anyway, says she turned to the Internet because even in disguise, she would draw throngs of admirers in public.
Online shopping also vexes employers, not so much out of concern for employees’ budgets but for its time-wasting opportunities. According to an October poll conducted by America Online, 43 percent of people shop online during the workday, with peak periods being early morning, after lunch, and right before quitting time.
Companies, at least some of them, are fighting back. A poll of about 300 companies conducted in 2002 shows that 20 percent of them have installed software that blocks employees from shopping online at work, according to Websense, a company that makes such software.
