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News from Stopping Overshopping
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Recognizing how much more difficult it is to "do it alone," we're in the process of making new stopping overshopping support accessible and affordable. Please stay tuned: we're launching something in a few weeks that can help you make next year a whole new beginning!
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With economic crises, come shopping and spending stories, both private and public—and this quarter, with the end-of-year holidays upon is, there've been even more than usual. Over the past three months, compulsive shopping has been all over the news, on a number of reality shows—The Bank of Mom and Dad, The Secret Lives of Women (to be rebroadcast on December 22, on the Women’s Entertainment network at midnight, EST)—and been the subject of countless TV and radio news segments as well as newspaper and magazine columns. (For details, see my online press kit (http://www.stoppingovershopping.com/television_media.html) and articles list (http://www.stoppingovershopping.com/overspending_articles.html).
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And more is coming! Discovery Health will feature an overshopping piece to be televised in March, Cosmopolitan International in the December-January issue, and Marie Claire in the February issue.
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It's A Threepeat! This Tuesday, December 22, the airwaves will be buzzing with last-minute, out-of-the-box ways to have a good, not a goods, holiday. April will be a guest on three radio shows that day:
- 9:30 a.m., EST: It's Your Health Radio, with Lisa Davis, M.P.H., C.N.C., on 91.5 FM from Lowell, Mass. To listen live from anywhere, go to itsyourhealthradio.org and click the orange box on the homepage. The program will also be archived on that site. Just click on audio archives.
- Noon, EST: Psychiatry on Doctor Radio, with Psychiatrists Dolores Malaspina and Michael Aronoff , on Sirius XM, Channel 114, XM Channel 119. To listen live on line, go to http://www.sirius.com/siriusinternetradio. (Go to http://www.sirius.com/freetrial/register for a free 7-day trial subscription to Sirius XM.)
- 2:20 CST: on 89.5 FM—WBEW—from Chesterton, Indiana. You can stream the show live on the internet from anywhere in the world by clicking the Listen Live Button at the top of the page, or visiting the On Air section of the website www.vocalo.org.
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Traffic on our website continues to grow, and a Korean language version of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop will appear shortly. There are rumblings that the rights to publish in Portuguese and Chinese may be sold soon, but nothing definite yet!
Therapists, counselors, coaches, and financial educators are beginning to want stopping overshopping groups in their home cities. We want to support this encouraging development by offering training and supervision. If you're interested in starting a stopping overshopping group, please send an e-mail to us at info@stoppingovershopping.com Dr. Kathleen Galek, Dr. Sarah Weinberger-Litman, and I are planning to continue the empirical research we started a year ago, a study to test the efficacy of the stopping overshopping model. Dr. Galek and Dr. Weinberger-Litman have recently completed a multi-center study of compulsive buying and its relationship to compulsive eating and quality of life issues in college students. They'll be reporting on their findings in the next issue of this newsletter. -
Given the fact that young adulthood is frequently when compulsive buying behavior begins in earnest, we'll do our part to stem the tide by blogging for Debt Free U (http://www.debtfreeu.org) in the new year.
I've written a case study that follows the healing journey of one member of our telecoaching groups. It will be published in the forthcoming book, Compulsive Buying: Clinical Foundations and Treatment, edited by James E. Mitchell, M.D., and Astrid Muller, M.D., Ph.D. (Routledge, 2010). -
In November, over 400 financial professionals attended my keynote presentation, Stopping Overshopping: Three Highly Effective Techniques, at the annual conference of the Association for Financial Counseling, Planning, and Education, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Many in the audience were financial counselors in the military or financial educators in the extension divisions of major universities, on the front lines of the overshopping struggle. I was delighted to help them expand their arsenal of tools, skills, and strategies. I'll be teaching a four-session course for financial counselors and educators beginning in mid-January. For details, click here: http://www.stoppingovershopping.com/cpetelecourse-4session.htm.
Holiday Reading
Although I haven't had the chance to more than skim these two timely and fascinating new books, I did want to make sure you knew about them:
Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What (Lee Eisenberg, Free Press, 2009) "leads us on a provocative and entertaining tour of America's love/hate affair with shopping, a pursuit that, even in hard times, remains a true national pastime." Eisenberg's careful chronicling of the dynamics of buying and selling is sure to expand the knowledge base of people hoping to get a better handle on their overshopping behavior.
Joel Waldfogel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009), isn't against spending, just sloppy spending. Research suggests that consumers waste some $85 billion each winter making ill-informed purchases that lead to credit card debt. According to Waldfogel, gifts for others generate on average 20% less satisfaction than the stuff we buy for ourselves. He suggests that we allow recipients to choose their own gifts, via gift cards and similar strategies. |
Shopaholics and the Holiday Season
Seldom have the waters been muddier. This season’s holiday buy-hype is a drum beat, inescapable, louder than most of us have ever heard; after all, it’s been a miserable time for retailers, and they count on the season for 40% of their sales volume and nearly half their profits. So there are sales everywhere, some of them genuinely spectacular.
But the economy is still faltering, with unemployment officially at 10%—it’s far higher when you add in those who are so discouraged, they're no longer even looking for work——and a housing market that’s seriously depressed. On top of this, there’s an explosion of personal debt, which today has reached 330% of what it was in 1982, the only other time since World War II we had 10% unemployment.
And it gets even more complicated. While consumers are going into this holiday season “more scared…than any time in the last 50 years…[and looking for] good value on the items they want and need,” retailers don’t seem to have grasped this. Instead of catering to the changed needs of the public, sellers are offering “ever-more extreme discounts on items they want to get rid of” (Burt Flickinger III, on MSNBC.com).
Amidst this maelstrom, overshoppers’ heads are spinning. An AP-GfK poll of more than a thousand adults found that “fully 93 percent say they’ll spend less or about the same as last year….Most people—80 percent—say they’ll use mostly cash to pay for their holiday shopping, and that generally means buying less.” Yet data from two credit tracking firms suggests that “after months of paying off debt, some Americans pulled out their credit cards and started charging in October.” Average balances edged up “about 8% to $8,083 in the third quarter, from $7,489 in the second.”
What’s an overshopper to do? Make a sensible plan and stick to it! Tune out the buy, buy, buy drumbeat, the merchants’ pitch that opening our wallets is the way to get into the holiday frame of mind. Reject the obscene linkage of spirit and spending. Whether you buy for self or others—or even for pets—don’t succumb to the “normalcy” of overdoing it. Nancy Ridgway and her colleagues at the University of Richmond have found that “people who have low self-esteem, are depressed, anxious, [or] stressed, tend to be the ones who are most likely to be compulsive buyers….They can be led by the excitement to buy more. The huge crowds and all the hype [are] really an excuse to buy.”
Don’t succumb. Be judicious about all your holiday purchases. Pay for them with cash, so much more real than plastic. Be especially careful of internet purchases, and if you do buy online, do it during the day, not at 2 a.m., when the privacy and isolation of the moment can lead to excess. Above all, hang on the true meaning of the season. Share yourself and your love, rather than getting shoved into a buying frenzy.
Sim Sites: A Surprising Low-Cost, Low-Risk Alternative for Some Overshoppers
The global recession is pinching pretty much everyone, scaling us all back. Even dyed-in-the-wool overshoppers are curtailing their purchases, dragged into prudence by economic anxiety. For some, however, Sim Sites—online virtual communities such as Second Life, There, or Moove—are an increasingly attractive alternative. In these worlds, your avatar (the character that represents you) can shop ‘til he or she drops, choosing from an almost limitless selection of whatever you’re passionate about—shoes, handbags, watches, cars, airplanes, islands—without overdrawing your checking account. As in the real world, the virtual products you buy are designed and sold by other community members. As in the real world, you can make (and spend) virtual currency in all sorts of ways. But the scale is different: about $40 in real money will get you 70,000 Therebucks (the currency at There.com) or 10,000 Lindens (the currency at SecondLife.com).
In a recent piece about these sites, “No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You” (The New York Times, October 21, 2009), Ruth La Ferla introduces us to Virginia nurse Mandy Cocke. “When times were flush,” she tells us, “Ms. Cocke … parted with as much as $1,000 a month on designer shoes and clothing.” Lately, “pretty much every possible expense makes [her prudently] ask, ‘Do I really need this?’” Vixie Rayna, however, Ms. Cocke’s avatar in Second Life, brooks no such caution. “Not a month goes by in which she isn’t spending as much as 50,000 [Lindens] on housing, furniture, or her special weakness: multistrap platform sandals, tricked out in feathers and beads.”
Mandy Cocke is no anomaly; virtual world purchases are way up. La Ferla quotes Jonty Glaser, a partner in Stiletto Moody, a Second Life shoe brand: “as fewer people travel or spend on entertainment, we have seen them focus online…[on]small-ticket purchases.” These “microtransactions” have made Second Life what Glaser calls “a recession-tolerant economy.” Recession-tolerant and then some! Second Life reported a 94 percent surge in its overall economy in this year’s second quarter over the same period a year ago.
In the worst economic year most of us can remember, purchases in the virtual world have skyrocketed. What are we to make of this? What does it mean that overshoppers have flocked and are flocking to Sim Sites, where they can meet their needs and still keep hold of their purse strings? I think it underlines the extent to which fantasy rather than need drives compulsive shopping, whether in the real world or its virtual lookalikes. Overshoppers are trying to buy a feeling, not a thing. They want to be more confident, or sexier, or smarter, and they’ve bought into the carefully formulated hype that products can get them there. So whether their purchases deplete a bank account and take up household space or (in a Sim world) come far cheaper and require only disk storage, they’re getting the same rush—and, in the Sim world, without the negative long-term consequences. On the Sim Sites, there’s no equivalent of “a minute on the lips, forever on the hips!”
Irish Youth Feel Recession Keenly, are Prepared to Share the Burden
In Ireland, where the recession has hit even harder than in the United States, a new survey yields results that are simultaneously worrisome and encouraging. In a piece published in The Herald, Ireland’s evening newspaper, Cormac Byrne discusses the survey’s results. Some 40% of the 250 youths polled said that ”financial limitations on their family budget are causing previously unexperienced problems.” More than a quarter of the young people have seen a parent either forced to take a pay cut or laid off, and about the same number said their families “had scrapped plans for the holidays this year.” The same percentage acknowledged “heightened tensions” at home.
The encouraging side of the survey was the willingness of the youths to pitch in. Most young people agreed on the family’s need to cut back on luxuries, and noted that nearly everywhere, overshopping had given way to scrimping and saving. Half the subjects, all aged 12 to 17, said they were willing to cut back on their cell phone minute usage and abandon fashionable labels to help meet the crisis. 60% said that because of the recession, they were “less likely to ask their parents for money.” Significantly, “well over half … now find themselves more aware of how much things cost and are more appreciative of what they have.” And one in three is prepared to take “a part-time job to provide extra cash.”
I’m Doing the Holidays Differently This Year:
One Group Member’s Story
“Thanks to the Stopping Overshopping group and program, I have experienced new emotions and intention as I move forward with this year’s Christmas holidays. Previously, I would buy voraciously, spending well over a thousand dollars per daughter and half of that on my husband. It was as though I was in a competitive race with the whirlwind of Christmas shopping. This year I have made the conscious decision to appreciate the process rather than be driven by it. I’m buying only with gift cards, debit card, or cash, and before any purchase I tell myself to breathe, take a pause, and walk around the store. How empowering it’s felt to go into a store and not randomly or frantically throw items in my cart! This season’s shopping high is a very special Christmas present for my husband: he proposed to me in Paris, and I found an antique postcard of the city and bought a frame to match it. This is such a BIG DEAL for me—a thoughtful present, not an expensive one!
This year, I’m delighting in the season rather than feeling overwhelmed by it. I wrap each gift carefully—last year, alas, I paid someone else to do this—and I document in my journal item, cost, and recipient. Mindful shopping has brought me peace. In my journal I remind myself: experience the joy of effortless accomplishments; don’t make things harder than they need to be.”
—C.S., Alabama |
The office will be closed from December 24 until January 3. We wish you and yours a joyous holiday season and look forward to reconnecting with you in 2010!
 About April Lane Benson, Ph.D.
April Lane Benson, Ph.D., is a nationally known psychologist who specializes in the treatment of compulsive buying disorder. She has been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. Dr. Benson graduated cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University, and has earned a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Ferkauf Graduate School, Yeshiva University.
Dr. Benson's new book, To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop (Trumpeter, 2008) presents a comprehensive program to help eliminate compulsive buying behavior. Her first book, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self (Aronson, 2000), takes a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of compulsive buying. It includes contributions from the fields of sociology, consumer behavior, marketing, community education, psychology, and psychiatry.
Frequently quoted in the media, Dr. Benson has been seen recently on the Today Show, CNBC, CBS News, and quoted in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
© 2009, Stopping Overshopping LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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