Compulsive shopping is surging: what makes people buy loads of stuff?

From China to Brazil to Germany, huge numbers of people are addicted to shopping, driven in part by companies that use gaming strategies.

Sadie has spent years hiding her problem from her family. In her day job, she works as a purchasing agent for a scientific firm, which requires placing large orders for everything from chemical reagents to US$8-million worth of glass vials. But in her personal time, Sadie goes on buying sprees for herself. She has ordered cameras, camera accessories, scrapbooking supplies, metal-detecting equipment, lasers, board games, planners, fountain pens, tech gadgets, nail polish, computer keyboard parts and yarn. She bought everything online.

Before she knew it, she was $20,000 in debt. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I never told my husband how bad it was.” She has been paying the debt off, but she can’t say exactly where the total stands today. “I’m so ashamed I won’t even check the balance,” she says. Sadie asked to remain anonymous so her family would not find out that she’s a compulsive shopper.

Sadie’s struggle is not a new phenomenon. German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described krankhafte Kauflust — the pathological desire to buy — as early as 1899. But many specialists worry that the problem is getting much worse now — in part because of the rise of e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Chinese fast-fashion firm Shein and online marketplace Temu, some of which use game-like strategies to sell items. Last year, the European Commission announced it was investigating several aspects of Temu’s business, including “the risks linked to the addictive design of the service”.

As more and more shopping has moved online, retailers are increasingly using powerful psychological techniques to keep shoppers spending money. The Internethas, in effect, turned “mundane behaviours” such as shopping into “something that resembles a drug”, in the view of Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California, and the author of popular books about addiction. As a result, she says, “it suddenly becomes a problem for the masses”.

And that problem extends across the globe. Researchers have studied compulsive shopping in many countries, including the United States, Turkey, Poland, Germany, India, Brazil, South Korea and Pakistan — where almost one-third of university students were classified as compulsive buyers in both physical stores and online.

There is particular concern about the problem in China, which might have the highest prevalence of the condition ever recorded. Heping He, a marketing researcher at Shenzhen University in China, conducted a survey that found around 29.1% of the general population of China shopped compulsively.

He is one of many researchers around the globe who are investigating the prevalence of the problem as well as the brain pathways involved and how compulsive shopping relates to similar types of condition. But researchers studying these issues face a problem: there is no official diagnosis of shopping addiction or compulsive shopping, which could help to stimulate further research and aid with demands for regulation.

Consumer culture

Although compulsive shopping has probably existed for as long as money and markets have, the Internet has made it much easier for people to make purchases. “Before the rise of online shopping in China, few people paid attention to compulsive-buying behaviour,” says He. Today, China is “one of the most developed regions globally in terms of Internet commerce”, he says. Add that to what he describes as “a materialistic consumer culture” and you’ve got an epidemic of shopping addiction.

Compulsive shopping was once seen as problem that affected mostly women. But not all studies have found differences between genders, especially among younger shoppers. In China, He says “the gender gap in compulsive buying appears to be narrowing, as men increasingly embrace online shopping amid the boom in Internet retailing”.

Although data suggest that the problem is surging, there’s no official entry for shopping addiction or compulsive shopping in the two main references that are used to help make diagnoses: the International Classification of Diseases — which is maintained by the World Health Organization — and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Many clinicians and researchers say that the time has come to make the condition official. This is necessary, they say, to help people who are facing the problem to gain access to care.

One reason compulsive shopping is not yet a recognized disorder is a lack of consensus on its cause. Researchers debate whether it is brought about by a pathological level of impulsivity, a compulsion resembling obsessive–compulsive disorder or a behavioural addiction, activating reward pathways similar to those linked to drugs and alcohol. Although many researchers who have looked into the issue would like to see more studies completed, the addiction model for compulsive shopping seems to be ascendant among specialists, as the broader category of behavioural addictions is increasingly accepted. Gambling disorder, which is in many ways similar to compulsive shopping, was added to the fifth edition of the DSM in 2013 and was grouped with addictions to substances.