Shopping addiction

Shopping addiction is defined as the deficiency of impulse control which appears as the eagerness for constantly making new purchases of unnecessary or superfluous things. It is a concept similar to "compulsive buying disorder" and "oniomania", although these terms usually have a more clinical approach, related to a psychological individual disorder of impulse control. The phrase “shopping addiction” usually has a more psychosocial perspective . or it is placed among drug-free addictions like the addiction to gambling, Internet, or video-games.

There are three kinds of behavioural manifestations of shopping addiction, with different repercussions. These can be displayed together or independently and in more or less intense ways. Nevertheless, they are closely related and appear joined in people who seriously suffer from this disorder.

First is the attraction towards the consumer stimulus, which is the addiction to purchasing as a leisure activity. This is about the uncontrolled and excessive draw to use shopping as a leisure activity, usually in an exclusive and overwhelming way. While activities such as window-shopping, visiting shops or spending time in commercial centres is a common and socially accepted desire activity, an addict is differentiated as one in whom this excessive attraction to purchase interferes with the normal development of life and damages their relationships with others, becoming an obsessive and uncontrolled activity.

Although shopping addiction and compulsive purchase are conceptually different, they are interrelated and both are manifestations of the same problem: the lack of self-control when buying and to restrain impulses. Shopping addiction is understood as the eagerness for constantly making new purchases of unnecessary or superfluous things. The concept of compulsive purchase is related to the psychological process which causes many people not to be able to control their impulses and wishes of buying, and subjects them to reflexion and evaluation before purchasing. A basic behavioural characteristic of people who have serious problems of consumer addiction is that their purchases are unnecessary and unsatisfactory. Addicts may feel pleasure or relief when they give in to the shopping wish, but regret it afterwards. In cases of people with severe problems of shopping addiction, this remorse can lead to very deep feelings of blame and discomfort.

Lack of economic self-control: this is the serious and permanent inability to adjust the habits of spending to the economic means of the individual. This is not about one's ordinary or unexpected spending making life difficult, but is an absolute inability to control the personal or family income in a rational way, and to discipline their buying, no matter how superfluous it is. A manifestation of this lack of control is usually the excessive use of indebtedness. The final result is the active or “guilty” over-indebtedness; this is which is derived from the improper behaviour of the consumer.

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Wikipedia