When Jesse Breshears saw the 5-inch Christian Louboutin platform heels, she had to have them. Marked down from $610 to $160, the deal was too good to pass up. Same with the Jimmy Choos. At $200, an irresistible bargain.
Not that she could afford these designer duds. Breshears, now 22 and living in Lincoln Park, was a college student at the time her penchant for shopping went into overdrive. Her part-time job at a clothing store didn’t so much help cover the bills as compel her to shop more.
By the time she was 20, Breshears said, she had nine credit cards and $5,000 in credit card debt. Phone calls from unknown numbers filled her with “overwhelming dread,” she said, as she feared creditors were calling to collect payment.
Breshears is trying to bounce back from her foray into financial turmoil, but the shopping itch is tough to shake.
“I don’t go out to parties, I don’t go to bars; I shop,” said Breshears, who works as a store manager at Barney’s Co-Op in Lincoln Park. “And I have nowhere to wear the things I buy.”
Plenty of people get a kick out of shopping, and some zealous shoppers embrace the “shopaholic” designation as a mark of their fashion enthusiasm. In “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” a movie to be released this month based on the best-selling book series by Sophie Kinsella, the heroine (Isla Fisher) keeps an emergency credit card in a block of ice in her freezer and has a catfight in a department store over a pair of Prada boots.
But some people struggle with serious consequences of shopaholism — or what psychologists call “compulsive buying.”
Even as many Americans shut their wallets to weather the economic storm, others are finding the down economy is exacerbating their urge to splurge.
“Some people will be forced to cut back, but some will become more compulsive in their shopping because they’re so frightened by the economic situation, and shopping is the drug they use to calm themselves down,” said Dr. Robert Galatzer-Levy, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the University of Chicago.
The steep discounts at many retailers provide additional temptation, said Terrence Shulman, founder and director of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft and Spending, located in Franklin, Mich.
Latoya Tucker, a 26-year-old self-professed shopaholic who lives in Des Plaines, said she recently went to Woodfield Mall to buy a gift for her sister and ended up spending four hours there checking out all the sales.
“It’s like shopaholic heaven,” Tucker said. “They were giving away stuff. They had shoes marked down from $80 to $15.”
Tucker, a marketing manager, said she’s compulsive in her shopping. It’s rare for her to go into a store without buying something, and she returns items so often she called herself a “return-aholic.” When she can’t return an item, she sells it on eBay.
“Shopping is kind of like going out drinking,” Tucker said. “Maybe I’ve had a bad day, or I need to get my mind off something.”
Tucker two years ago had racked up $10,000 in debt, 70 percent to 80 percent of it from shopping, she said. It wasn’t until she started her own fashion event production company, L’ Shanell Event Productions, in 2007 that Tucker said she started to turn herself around, as her priority became investing in her business.
The line between zealous and compulsive shopping is a blurry one, but ultimately shopping becomes problematic when it causes negative consequences — be they financial, in relationships, with time management or self-esteem, Shulman said. Shopping addicts often lie about their shopping, feel like they can’t control it, and have a deep sense of shame about it, he said. Eventually, it can become like a drug, providing a temporary high they constantly crave.
“It’s regarded as a psychological problem when it interferes with life and is no longer pleasurable,” Galatzer-Levy said.
A 2006 Stanford University Medical Center study found that about 5.8 percent of Americans are compulsive buyers, with a slightly higher prevalence among women than men (6 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men).
The American Psychiatric Association is considering including “compulsive buying disorder” in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM), out in 2012, which would make it an official mental illness in the eyes of doctors, courts, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies.
That’s a controversial move, but ultimately “oniomania,” the medical term for compulsive shopping, is taken more seriously now than it used to be, Galatzer-Levy said. He recommends psychotherapy, though some anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications have been shown to help lessen shopping compulsion when depression or anxiety are the underlying problems. Credit counseling and Debtors Anonymous meetings also offer support.
For 20-year-old Alicia Owen of Columbus, Ohio, a shopping obsession driven by “low self-esteem and horrible self-image” quickly spiraled out of control.
By the time she was 19, Owen was $20,000 in debt. Her electricity was shut off several times for failure to pay her electric bill, and her furniture was repossessed after she couldn’t make payments to the furniture rental company.
Owen, whose shopping problem was featured on MTV’s “True Life” in July, is trying to dig herself out of the hole. She has paid down $3,000 of her debt. And she goes to weekly Debtors Anonymous meetings, sees a therapist and plans her life around avoiding malls.
“Simple things, like going to the store to get toilet paper, is a stressful thing,” said Owen, who has had to put college on hold while she sorts out her finances.
People get hooked on shopping to varying degrees and for different reasons.
Danielle Lutz, 34, of Bucktown said she’s addicted to the thrill of “the hunt” and the euphoric feeling she gets when she finds the best of what she’s looking for.
Lutz — who turned her shopping obsession into a business, Shop Walk, which tours Chicago boutiques — said she never went into major debt, but she has been late to dates because she was shopping, and she estimates that at one point she owned 30 pairs of black pants.
Sarah Sands, store manager of Akira-Women in Bucktown, said the shopaholics who come into her store have been undeterred by the prospect of economic Armageddon. (She considers shopaholics to be regulars who spend at least $1,000 per month in her store.)
Though staff will tell their customers honestly if they think something looks terrible, they don’t interfere if the purchase seems excessive, Sands said.
“As much as we know about them, we don’t know their situation, what they can afford or how much stuff they actually have,” Sands said.
“It’s really not our place to sit here and judge people.”
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Retailers shout ‘sale!’
The steeply discounted merchandise at stores isn’t just tempting — it’s in your face.
Usually, retailers tuck sale items at the back of the store and showcase fresh, full-price merchandise up front. Not in this turbulent economy. Merchants are trumpeting markdowns at the front of the store and even in their windows in hopes of drawing reluctant shoppers through the door.
Fewer than 5 percent of shoppers say they will pay full price for an item compared with 11 percent a year ago, according to an America’s Research Group survey of 1,000 shoppers last month. TRIBUNE
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POLL POSITION
RedEye polled its Twitter followers on this question: When does a deal become impossible to resist? Here are the results. Your chance to be featured is just a click away. Sign up at twitter.com/redeyechicago.
COMPILED BY SCOTT KLEINBERG
When an item is 33% off
3%
When an item is 50% off
49%
When an item is 60% off
41%
When an item is buy one, get one
8%
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
