Thoughts on r/ShoppingAddiction

As you may know, Reddit is a huge online platform, acting as a content aggregator. It is now seen as a hub for lots of information online. Reddit has also turned into a meta-forum of sorts, allowing users to create their own subreddits and foster online communities, just like Internet forums back in the day.

There are lots of various “subreddits”, some for hobbies, some for entertainment, and some for help with addiction. I do not use Reddit, but it often pops up in search engine results. Just like any other social media, of course, it is designed to keep you on the platform as long as possible, usually by recommending similar, related, or popular content.

I don’t remember which post showed up as related in particular, or what I was searching for originally, but I found my way to the r/ShoppingAddiction subreddit with >30,000 members. I wanted to share some thoughts I had on what the users of the subreddit were saying and how I feel about shopping addiction in general.

Right off the bat, the header image is of a feminine hand with painted nails clutching a purse. From what I understand, women statistically struggle more with shopping addiction, and a lot of the posters are women. This helps set the tone for what kinds of things they may struggle with not buying. Walking into a clothing store, it is hard not to notice that at least 75% of the floor is dedicated for women. Businesses would not dedicate so much space to them, if the statistics were a lie.

In our fast-paced world, shopping offers an instant hit of relief upon purchase. It feels like one achieved something, gained something, exchanged arbitrary currency for something tangible. However, I have personally noticed that this feeling goes away rather quickly, and only sticks with the few products that I have carefully researched and waited on before purchasing. Furthermore, my parents were somewhat frugal, and it was instilled in me to really consider what I am paying money for. Some of this I am trying to unlearn, most of it I will heed for the rest of my life.

Perhaps my upbringing and general personality is the reason why I don’t understand people who have a serious shopping addiction. Some of the comments on posts I saw explain that the brain justifies a sale or discount as an opportunity to get “free value” or somehow “beat the system”. Knowing, however, that price is usually an indicator of quality, and understanding that most products cost much less to produce than to buy, makes it difficult for my brain to see it that way.

In fact, I normally view an advertisement for a product as the business’s attempt at getting money out of me. This may be cynical, but it is a factual statement. If the product would be worth the amount of time I worked for it, then it is a fair trade, of course. Otherwise, knowing how much money goes into advertising and marketing–having taken some courses on how it functions–my brain refuses to see any remotely useful item on sale as “free value”. Additionally, there are lots of fun factoids about average debt per person in the US, which are scary.

With all that said, all these facts would not prevent an addict from acting on impulse–otherwise, it wouldn’t be an addiction. In the same way that gambling addiction is completely irrational (i.e. contradictory to win statistics and basic money-in vs. money-out logic), there is no reason to view shopping addicts as lacking common sense, since something more primal is supressing their ability to reason in a moment of temptation.

I’m not going to mention any particular posts on the subreddit, as you can imagine what the titles might be – “I’m X dollars in debt, HELP!!”, “I relapsed today”, “No Buy roll call”, etc. I think with any addiction, it is simply a coping mechanism to fulfill some missing quality of life. Marketers will specifically attempt to sell a product as an “experience” – in fact, I just saw a mailer this morning, marketing a Philips™ shaver with the tagline that goes, “The right tool makes every day a holiday”.

Personally, I do window shop from time to time, but actually picking up the item, waiting in line at the counter, and paying for it—or in the case of online shopping, filling out all my shipping and billing info—provides enough resistance for me not to go through with it. Additionally, I am a rather organized person, and the thought of having more stuff in my home to deal with provides even further resistance, having to justify if it’s worth the space.

I do not have a good conclusion for this post; I mainly want to draw attention to the fact that addiction exists in many forms. I suggest you check out r/shoppingaddiction to see some of these posts for yourself, as it is rather informative. The aforementioned “resistance” actually ties into something I want to write about another time, namely the link between privacy and digital minimalism.

P.S. And if I may, godspeed to those participating in NNN.