“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness, just didn’t know where to shop,” my post-it intones. Without shying away from the unpopular truth about overconsumption and happiness being like oil and water, James Roberts encourages us to step back, notice, and yes, even laugh at our obsession with shiny objects. He helps us see how we got here and then takes us on a fascinating tour of the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold-department. Pointing to important research findings and offering practical exercises helps us embrace our goals and values and develop the self-control we need to understand that we can never get enough of what we don’t really need.

The Media Education Foundation’s film Shop ‘Til You Drop: The Crisis of Consumerism is a refreshingly contemporary and interdisciplinary peek into the machinery of American consumerism and advertising. Though it sees no end in sight to our appetite for overconsumption, it documents an end to the capacity of our planet, with its limited resources, to sustain that appetite.

To set the stage, we hear a dizzying staccato recitation by Juliet Shor, author of Born to Buy—all the objects in a typical middle class home—as we kaleidoscope through stuff.

The first half of the film focuses on the psychological impacts of consumerism: how the media and advertisers bombard us and how their techniques manipulate our desires, making us believe that we need much more than we actually do.

If you play soft music to cows, they give more milk. If you play music to shoppers, they buy more stuff. The many talking heads in the film— professors, authors, mental health professionals, and leaders of the Voluntary Simplicity movement—suggest that we need to step out of the Matrix and learn to make choices for ourselves. Otherwise, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

Once upon a time, we consumed conspicuously because we wanted our neighbors to see what we had; the paradigm was local social comparison. Today, the reference frame has expanded. It’s moved from the roughly egalitarian neighborhood of the folks on your block to the national “neighborhood” of televised affluence. There’s rising anxiety in our culture as people continuously compete to live like the wealthy.

The second half of the film swings to a more ecological perspective, straightforwardly addressing the issue of how the consumerist drive of developed nations is using up or harming–even destroying–our most precious resources. In the process, we may well be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

Shop ‘Til You Drop is more than a useful tool for the overshopper; it’s a much-needed wake-up call for all of us. The film encourages us to see that the habit of “keeping up with the Joneses”—whether they live next door or in the fantasy world of television and other media—misuses our lives and our planet. It offers us some perspective and invites us to step back and reassess our values and goals.

Dr. Maggie Baker’s new book, Crazy About Money: How Emotions Confuse Our Money Choices And What To Do About It, offers a comprehensive look at our complex and variable relationship with money throughout the course of our lives.  Although we tend to view money as an autonomous component of our daily life, Dr. Baker stresses that “money itself is only part of the issue.”  From the moment it becomes ours, money entangles itself with our emotions and beliefs in a complex sequence of knots; Crazy About Money sets out to bring these knots into clearer focus, show us how we got so tangled up in the first place, and, in the process, set out the steps to untie our emotions and beliefs from our financial selves.

The first half of the book focuses on the “cauldron of emotions that seethe around dealing with money.”  Dr. Baker debunks the cultural myth that money is a precise and rational process by outlining its chameleon-like presence in our biological, developmental, and individual selves.  The second half of the book details the particular life circumstances that we might find ourselves in (single, married, recently divorced, etc.) with an emphasis on practical strategies for developing a well-rounded financial self tailored to these particular situations.  Every chapter concludes with a set of exercise questions (including Dr. Baker’s thoughtful responses for herself) that help us become more aware of our money type, our insecurities surrounding finances, and our ability to develop a healthier orientation towards our individual emotions and beliefs surrounding money.

Crazy About Money is an invaluable tool in our struggle to come to terms with how we got into our present financial situation and how we can get out.  In identifying our monetary blind spots, we already become better equipped to withstand the challenges of balancing our finances. With Crazy About Money, Dr. Baker offers us both a wise, holistic take on the manifold ways that we let money affect our lives and a practical guidebook for re-orienting our financial beliefs and strategies.

As a reforming bookaholic and bargain shopper, I recently borrowed—borrowed, please note—a fascinating audiobook from the library, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, by Ellen Ruppell Shell. It’s all about consumerism and it focuses particularly on discount stores—which happen to be the site of many of my purchases that I later regret. The book was a revelation. It taught me how carefully, how subtly, how diabolically marketers work to create an artificial feeling of need in consumers likes me.

This new knowledge intensifies my motivation to kick the overshopping habit. I don’t want to be a tool of the marketplace, but rather a sentient being who makes independent choices. Now that I realize how many of my “needs” are in fact merely desires I’ve been manipulated into having, I’m finding myself better able to step away from that process.

Samuel K. Freshman and Heidi E. Clingen’s new book, The Smartest Way to Save: Why You Can’t Hang on to Money and What to Do About It, is so deceptively simple and reader-friendly that you almost don’t notice until you’ve finished how comprehensive it is. Replete with wise and immediately practicable suggestions about how to use money to enhance your life, The Smartest Way to Save is also peppered with meaningful anecdotes and money stories about the authors and those people who helped them shape their money behavior. These stories foster a bond between the writers and their readers, facilitating change.

The book’s three parts encourage a reader to focus on money through three different lenses: in relation to oneself, in relation to others, and in relation to the larger world. This variety of perspectives can’t help but expand the consciousness of someone who doesn’t customarily look at his or her spending and saving habits objectively. In addition, Freshman and Clingen offer up a panoply of tools for managing your money, getting out from under debt, and saving for the future—a richness of resource I’ve rarely seen in other financial self-help books.

Anyone who follows their detailed suggestions for saving money on food, clothing, transportation, travel, and entertainment—and heeds their shrewd advice on protecting oneself from scams and other fraud—should be able to go forth unafraid— ready, willing, and able to move toward financial independence.

For years, I did not speak about my shopping addiction; In fact, I went to great pains to hide it. At the time, I was afraid it wouldn’t be taken seriously, or even laughed at.

Therefore, it may seem strange that I managed to pluck up the courage to write a memoir about my fifteen-year compulsive buying habit and ultimate recovery. But that’s exactly what I did—with some trepidation—yet always with the hope that my story would help bring this addiction out of the closet, and offer some assistance to others who are struggling with it.

In the past two months since the publication of my memoir, I have received many emails from readers. Surprisingly, there have been almost as many emails from men as from women. Many thank me for having written Spent, and almost all tell me something about their own compulsive shopping stories. All are heartfelt, poignant, and sincere.

One in particular, which I found especially touching, was from a young man who wrote, “your book changed my life.” I was taken aback when I read this in the subject box of his email. A much as I wished my story to aid readers, I don’t think I was prepared for such a declaration.

He explained in his email that at the age of twenty-four he was already on a compulsive shopping downward spiral, deep in debt and caught in the tap dance of trying to hide it all from everybody.

He went on to explain that after a day of hard shopping, he landed in a bookstore where he found, and bought, a copy of Spent. After reading it in one hungry gulp, he felt “changed” and inspired enough to cut up his credit cards, tell his father about his financial situation, and begin to analyze the reasons why he was shopping himself toward ruin.

One of his biggest challenges, he writes, was that he had a mother who also shopped compulsively, and he had come to relate to shopping as a viable coping mechanism.

Another was that he now understood that he had been using shopping to placate a terrible loneliness and emptiness he felt inside.

Without exception, every compulsive shopper I have been in contact with has expressed this sentiment: they relate to over shopping as a desire to fill a void. As cliché as this may sound, it rings true and raises other questions: Why do so many people feel such a void? Why do we gravitate toward things to fill this void? Does shopping and surrounding ourselves with things give us a sense of permanence in a world that seems to be moving too fast?

There have been a few readers who have complained that Spent is not like Confessions of a Shopaholic. They have described my story as not as much “fun” as that popular novel. Indeed, I can attest, being a shopping addict was never all that much fun. Any shopping addict reading this right now will probably be nodding in agreement.

Still, in my discussions and signings, most readers have been interested in the realities of shopping addiction, not in a portrayal that reinforces stereotypes and fantasies. Their questions and comments have been overwhelmingly thoughtful and earnest.

This is rewarding, since I wrote Spent as a cautionary story and a recovery story. I wrote this book to help others who, like myself, have been confused, frightened or ashamed by their compulsive shopping behavior. I also wrote it as a story that highlights some of the social and economic structures that supported my shopping addiction over the past decades.

As I discovered on my journey, understanding the forces that surround me, the society and culture that presents shopping as a form of entertainment and consumption as a symbol of a better life, is an important part of understanding why shopping could become an addictive behavior.

As I explain in Spent, by trying to build a sense of self primarily based on images presented in the media or what I bought, and trying to “keep up appearances,” I risked annihilating a more central and essential self. Ultimately, the key to understanding why I was shopping compulsively meant identifying with that essential “self.”

This identification lead to change. I do hope this is the “change” that my young male reader was referring to as well. Experiencing it has ended up being one of the great comforts and luxuries of my life. Ironically, it is a luxury that can’t be bought.

Lee Eisenberg’s Shoptimism is a journey into the psychology of shopping from two sides of the cash register, the buy side and the sell side. It could easily be the upbeat textbook for Retail 101, exploring in its first half the buy side—why we consumers shop—and in its second half the sell side, how different retailers target different demographic groups.

To gain insight into the sell side, for example, Eisenberg visits a professional “snoop” company that works with retailers to spy on shoppers and observe their behavior patterns. The company uses the data to keep track of what customers like, what store layouts work best to promote buying, and what repels customers from buying. The snoopers notice, for example, that customers pick up store fliers more often when they’re placed ten feet from the entrance than when they’re directly at the entrance. To better understand the buy side, the psychology behind shopping, Eisenberg talks with a Carnegie Mellon professor about a research study that monitors brain functions during shopping. Turning the relationship between the two sides over and over, as one might a snow globe, Eisenberg delves into the intricacies, drive, and effects of each.

Like a huge department store, this content-rich book has the potential to be dense and overwhelming. But Eisenberg’s infusions of humor from his own personal shopping jaunts as well as his capacity to present a great deal of information in an everyday, shopper-friendly way keep it buoyant and interesting. Information from economics, psychology, and sociology gurus offers us a rare, multi-dimensional perspective on the shopping world—where there’s lots more going on than meets either the eye or the credit card.

Shoptimism is definitely worth shopping for, even if you’re a compulsive buyer. By helping you understand what’s triggering your behavior—and how those triggers have been constructed—the book makes it more likely that you’ll think twice the next time you see that silky new blouse or flatscreen TV that you’ve been programmed to believe is an absolute must.

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Viking, 2009)
. An old philosopher’s question asks: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?” An updated version, tongue-in-cheek, is this: “If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?” In a new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, Geoffrey Miller asks a third question: If purchases are in fact messages—to possible mates, friends, or rivals—is anybody really getting the message?

Miller, of the University of New Mexico, looks at consumer behavior through the lens of the evolutionary psychologist. What he sees is a dance that has everything to do with biology. Through a series of experiments, he was able to demonstrate that people were “more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating” (John Tierney in The New York Times).

Then, having neatly delineated the messages that we send when we buy, Miller turns the tables, zeroing in on what he calls the “fundamental consumerist delusion”: in reality, nobody’s listening. Thus, however hopeful I may be that this expensive new watch will exude its power and precision onto my persona, that’s not gonna happen. The things we buy cannot transform us. And because they can’t, they won’t make much difference in how we’re treated.

For overshoppers, Miller’s book is a useful reminder that we’re driven to buy out of underlying needs. Acknowledging those needs and finding meaningful ways to fill them is the best way off the consumption treadmill. The alternative, hanging on, is nothing more than continuing to send messages into the void.

Recently, a number of overconsumers have decided to make radical changes in the course of a year and then write about their experiences. Mary Carlomagno did it in Give it Up: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less, which we reviewed in Vol. 1, Number 2, March, 2006. She chronicled giving up one commodity—cell phone, shopping, chocolate, etc.—each month for a year. Judith Levine did something similar in Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, a report on the decision that she and her husband made to give up buying anything non-essential for a year. Now, Alexis Hall, a media relations officer in Scotland and former broadcast journalist, has done it too. With In the Red: The Diary of a Recovering Shopaholic, she documents a year-long experiment in vastly reduced consumption.

The rules were simple: she’d buy no new clothes, shoes, or accessories, unless it was an absolute emergency. She’d limit food and transportation to 5£ per day and limit other incidental purchases to absolute necessities. (She calibrates the word “necessity” this way: “limo hire never has been and never will be a necessity, but when you start looking like a Shetland pony, the haircut falls into the necessity category.”) A second pledge was to pay off as much of her ₤31,637.84 debt as she could—without putting anything on an existing credit card or opening any new ones: “This year, what goes down has to stay down. I’m the financial equivalent of a recovering bulimic.” And somewhere along the way, she decides to wear every single unworn, long-time inhabitant of her closet before the experiment ends. (Her reconnaissance doesn’t end until the very last month, when she notes on Day 323, that she’s still turning up clothes she’s never worn, not even in the changing room of the shop they were bought in, and “shoes that have never done a decent day’s walking in their life.”

The book is humorous and playful and imaginative, as well as deeply serious. To economize, Hall changes her mode of transportation to a scooter—which, she tells us, affords her “a vroom with a view.” When tickets to a Woodstock-like concert prove unaffordable, she and long-time partner Kevin find a low-cost, high fun way to experience it anyway: they get out their camping lantern, set up their tent, and watch it on television! Roughing it in their living room, they have a great view of the stage and don’t have to stand in line for the bathroom.

By experiment’s end, good company and conversation have trumped shoes, feet down. Lest it seem easy, however, we also see how in a split second Hall’s powerful intentions can be interrupted by irritability, murderous thoughts and glances, jealousy of Kevin’s new clothes, and occasional slips. What saves her, it seems, are a prodigious capacity to laugh at herself and the world, a creative playfulness, the love of her dog, friends, and family, and the comfort of living in a space that’s no longer crammed with mess and clutter. By day 140, “money, or the lack of it, is no longer the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning.” Gradually, she realizes that “I’ve been so preoccupied with what I can have next . . . that I haven’t been able to enjoy what I already had.” The openness and wit of Hall’s account makes In the Red compulsive reading for any shopaholic wanting to stop.

Stuart Vyse’s Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money brings an important historical perspective to a current crisis, approaching debt not primarily as an individual issue but as a far broader sociological one. Vyse views our present debting behavior in the context of historical economic influences, moral financial perspectives, the evolution of credit and bankruptcy laws, and modern shopping and payment systems. He writes about “the new physics of spending and wanting,” including the roles of telecommunications, advertising, and the media, and shows how these combine to challenge our self-control and influence the public’s perception of debt.

Vyse doesn’t only explain why millions of Americans are falling into debt so easily and quickly. He offers numerous strategies for saving more, spending less, and wanting less, and he outlines the public policies that he hopes will reshape the American economic landscape. Going Broke proclaims: “we must recognize that we are all part of one great collective resource [and] we must work together to avoid the tragedies we see around us.” Drawing on developments in contemporary psychology and behavioral economics, and prefacing each chapter with personal accounts of Americans who’ve followed a variety of paths to debt, Vyse educates, prepares, and inspires Americans to create financial health for themselves.