Black Friday has passed and Cyber Monday is gone. These have to be the most troubling times of the year for those with a shopping addiction. All the deals and “steals”, along with the rationale of Christmas gift giving.
The rise of the Internet and electronic funds transfer makes it absolutely too easy for those with a shopping addiction to get a “fix”. No longer is it necessary to fight traffic and lines; you don’t even have to handle packages – they come right to your mailbox. All this with a few clicks. And there’s the real danger, not that the activity gets worse, but it gets faster.
Just like with Internet gambling, where gamblers can lose their savings from the comfort of their home office, a shopping addict can literally see (and buy from) tens of stores in an hour. Where a binge could have cost hundreds of dollars over the course of a day, they can now spend thousands in an afternoon. Worse still, the safety valve of returning products is much harder. It is no longer possible to drive back to the mall with a receipt – the “mall” is virtual and the purchases come from all over the country or even all over the world.
On a list of recommendations to overcome Internet shopping addiction, two stand out: Avoid Internet shopping sites and seek professional help.
Just in case the above wasn’t enough reason to be wary, there’s another worry mentioned on the CBS New York site. It appears that Internet shopping addicts are networking by way of Facebook and other social media sites. Here they can talk about their “deals” and what products they found irresistible – a sort of viral addiction process. Normally, a shopping addict operates solo and keeps their problem secret. But now, with social networking, they can interact anonymously with other addicts and the whole mess just makes the problem worse.
The latest trend is by way of YouTube. According to the CBS article: Here’s how it works: first the teens power-shop, buying as much as they can afford. Then, they post a video of everything they brought home, called a “haul video.”
To corrupt Shakespeare, "O brave new world, that hath such technology in it." Isn’t it always the way though? We get a new toy and impose upon it our old lusts and habits.
