Is Retail Therapy Real?

Collage by Yinne Smith

More than once during this quarantine, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through the Amazon, Target, and Urban Outfitters apps on my phone. I never bought anything – stationery supplies weren’t exactly necessary for virtual school, I didn’t require a rug for the dorm I wasn’t moving into, and the quarantine had allowed me to fall into the rhythm of mindlessly rotating between the same seven shirts each week, so I certainly didn’t need new clothes. Yet I still had this undeniable urge to scroll and shop and add things to my cart. 

I’d never made it far past checkout. My impulse control has always been rather good and I’m hardly one to spend my money mindlessly on things that I don’t need. Regardless of my control, the urge is always there, a shimmer of desire deep in my gut to get something shiny and new and have it delivered at my doorstep in a neat package. 

I realized quickly that even though my wallet rarely suffered from my impulses, it didn’t detract from the fact that retail therapy seemed very real to me. 

We see videos online of people splurging hundreds of dollars on a mall spree. Besides doing it for the views, there isn’t any other appeal to it other than making their wallets cry and curbing the hunger to purchase new things. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching as the cashier rings up your items, swiping your card, and getting to leave a place with a part of it remaining with you. But is it truly enough to justify impulse purchases? 

Sure, some may argue that retail therapy, in essence, really is a form of therapy. It relaxes you, lets you get out of your head for a while, and waking up the next morning is like escaping from a fever dream only to realize that past you decided to bring some gifts. The part that gets me all confused is that I thought therapy was supposed to help you, not harm you. 

Retail therapy promotes consumerism and instant gratification, two traits that are not beneficial to your life. First, consumerism is terrible from an environmental standpoint. Are the things you’re buying things that you’ll be using? Or are they just things you picked up in a haze of splurging on things that supposedly make you happy, only to Marie Kondo your whole place in the next few days and call it self-care? The instant gratification enforces tunnel vision. All you can see is this item and the brief happiness it will bring you once you spend your hard-earned money on it. In this haze, you don’t stop to think if it’s a worthwhile investment or some short-term fling you’re going to forget about as soon as you step into the next store. 

To make matters worse, retail therapy perpetuates the notion that we are material creatures. Retail therapy emphasizes the fact that we can't be happy without our abundant stationery supplies, seventh fuzzy rug, or yet another color-block sweater in our collection. Is it true that we can’t be happy without something to hold onto? Are we so unhappy with ourselves and the people around us that the only comfort we find is in inanimate objects?

While retail therapy seems like a very real coping mechanism for many of us, like material goods, the happiness it provides is very temporary. There are so many other positive therapeutic pursuits we could be fueling our energy into, whether it be through writing, creating art, knitting, playing an instrument, or learning a new language. Why do we spend our energy trying to fix ourselves by counterintuitively making our lives more cluttered and messy? Rather than fueling our energy into this endless cycle of shopping and stress, why don’t we find some more productive ways to uplift ourselves? 

Don’t punch your card number in. Delete those apps. Put down your phone. There is so much more to this world than any store, mall, or online retailer can offer you.