Alejandra Cruz
White privacy-blinds attempt to conceal the numerous items stored inside her closet. Banana Republic shirts and jeans have their own space on the left and purses from Fendi, Chanel, Marc Jacobs and Coach are hanging arranged from smallest to largest.
The 65 pairs of shoes don’t fit inside so they are piled on the other side of the room inside their boxes.
Studies estimate that approximately 17 million Americans are shopaholics. Television, radio, the Internet, billboards and other numerous forms of advertising try to make us want the goods and services of movie stars and famous people.
Ad catchphrases like, “You deserve it,” can make us feel like spending money on these products is the right thing to do.
The majority of college students start using credit cards as freshman and begin making their own decisions in financial matters.
Counselor Sheldon Roth said that during his 20 years at Pierce students have never admitted that they actually have a compulsive shopping problem. “They just say that they are going to stop going to school because they have to pay bills and I can just think that those might be credit card bills,” Roth said.
The economic crisis the country and the world are currently experiencing has not stopped many of those for whom spending is their first priority. With the closing of stores and the reduction of retail prices, the addiction to spend has been hard to control.
This is true for Maggie Galindo, a 25-year-old psychology major at Pierce.
Maggie is wearing blue jeans, a gray sweater and a small brown handbag. She is happy with all she has and doesn’t regret anything she has done.
Today she realizes that she probably has a problem.
The bag she is clutching costs $800. The 65 pairs of shoes and the total of 10 bags pouring out of her closet cost $400 or more each and are collecting dust. She loves to buy clothes from all the top designers like Chanel, Coach, Marc Jacobs and designer sunglasses by Salvatore Ferragamo, which run about $350.
She doesn’t have a massive debt because she used to earn the money she needed to buy all the brands she wanted. She lost her real state job in July 2007 and starter working in child development in February 2008.
Friends tell Maggie that she is sick but she doesn’t care. She started shopping when she felt depressed or anxious. What she really loves is to feel that she has control over a situation so she spends a lot of money on shoes and nobody can stop her.
“I make a third of what I used to. But I have a solution, now I buy two things with $100 instead of just one,” Maggie said. She defines her shopping as a hobby, something that makes her feels good.
She subscribes to a daily e-mail summary that tells her what is on sale that day. The first thing she does when she gets to work is check her shopittome.com e-mail. “This is my daily therapy,” she said.
Now that she realizes that she may be a shopaholic she said that with time she will try to stop. Once she owns a house and has children, she will stop doing this. “I think this has to do more with being materialistic, that you must have designers’ stuff, and God forbid I buy something fake,” Maggie said.
But Maggie is not alone in her shopping addiction.
Janet Fragoso was in the same predicament once. The difference with her is that she realized long ago that she was addicted to shopping. The 35 year-old with two kids and a husband used to buy everything she saw at the mall. If some cute boots were on sale she would carry them and four more of the same kind in different colors straight to the cashier. She had to match everything: her shirt with her shoes, jewelry with her pants, everything.
Janet started shopping compulsively when she got married at the age of 18. “My husband had to go to work and I was alone at home so I started going to the mall once a week, but that became three days a week and then almost every day,” Janet said.
Problems at home started to grow because of her bad spending habits. She found herself with $15,000 in credit card debt, but kept shopping anyway.
“When I was shopping at the mall I didn’t feel bad. I just said to myself, ‘You work hard for this, you deserve it,'” said Janet.
Banks gave her a lot of credit and she took it. She had 12 credit cards. She owed money on every single one of them.
At one time, Janet had more than 100 pairs of shoes. Her closet, her children’s closet, and the garage were full of new clothes, more than she could ever wear. She used to wear something new every day. Janet said that she lost count of how many items she had bought over the years.
Her wakeup call was when her marriage was breaking up because she had managed to rack up approximately $70,000 in debt. Now she can see that enough will never be enough but having what you need is what is important.
Now she is trying to stay away from credit cards and malls. She is back with her husband and says that if you want to stop this behavior you have to be strong and perseverant. “I know that God helped me because I wasn’t able to stop by my own,” Janet said.
According to Drew Williams, assistant in the addiction studies program at Pierce, an addiction is any behavior or use of any substance repeatedly that causes problems in your life. Shopaholics need to be treated like any other addict. They have to be cautious for the rest of their lives if they don’t want to keep making the same mistake, even if the addict has been “clean” for a long time.
“If you stick a cucumber in salt water and leave it in the salt water for a period of time when you pull out the cucumber is now a pickle and it can’t never go back to be a cucumber again; it always going to be a pickle and it’s the same with addiction. Once an individual becomes an addict there is no going back to not being an addict any more. They are always going to have the propensity towards the addiction, regardless if it’s a substance or a behavior. That person has to be cautious for the rest of their life,” said Williams.
“I guess I’m a shopaholic, I never thought about it!” said Maggie “Wow, a revelation.”
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