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 Internet has, 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 online¹.

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 compulsively².

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 shoppers³. 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.

According to Lembke, the phenomenology of shopping addiction also follows the classic addiction pattern: “People do it at the beginning either to have fun or to solve a problem, from managing anxiety or depression to loneliness to boredom.” If the behaviour works for them, they keep repeating it until “it changes their brains” and they can’t stop, even as they descend into debt and, in some cases, destroy relationships with close family, she says.

There are some brain-imaging studies that support the addiction theory for shopping. Patrick Trotzke, a psychologist at Charlotte Fresenius University in Cologne, Germany, scanned the brains of 18 people who were seeking treatment for buying–shopping disorder and 18 control participants while showing them pictures of shopping centres and shopping bags, as well as desirable objects, such as handbags and consumer electronics. In individuals with a shopping problem, these images activated the dopamine reward system in the striatum — the same system implicated in drug addiction⁴. “They get thrilled when you show them these pictures,” Trotzke says. “The dopaminergic reward system is on fire.” This tends to weaken the control system in the prefrontal cortex, Trotzke adds, until affected individuals “no longer have control” over their purchasing behaviour.

Further evidence that compulsive shopping is connected to this dopamine reward system comes from people who are taking excessive amounts of medicine that alters this system — and who then develop uncontrolled shopping behaviours⁵. In one case report of a person with Parkinson’s disease who took more dopaminergic medication than prescribed⁶, the individual “presented dressed in colourful clothes and was wearing three gold necklaces”. It emerged that they had purchased “over 5,000 pocket watches and 42 old and unusable cars”.

In 2021, 138 specialists from 35 countries were asked to weigh in on diagnostic criteria for buying–shopping disorder. The group used the Delphi method, which is an iterative and anonymous way of collecting opinions from a group that prevents leading researchers from exerting undue influence⁷. The group agreed that the condition was a distinct entity that was “due to addictive behaviours” and settled on the name “compulsive buying disorder”. The study’s authors derived a proposed list of criteria for the disorder, which includes intrusive urges to buy; lack of control over buying; buying items without using them; chasing the high of buying and using buying to feel better about bad feelings; and experiencing negative consequences because of buying.

However, the idea that people either have or do not have compulsive buying disorder might be simplistic. “It’s a spectrum disorder, just like drugs and alcohol,” Lembke says. “Some people have a bit of a shopping problem and other people end up with very severe addictions where they go into huge financial debt and they lose their primary relationship.”

A 2020 study of more than 1,000 people in Switzerland grouped participants into categories of shoppers, including ‘risky’ and ‘addicted’. The researchers estimated that around 3% of the people in their sample were truly addicted to online shopping, with a further 11% at risk, because they agreed with the statements “I think about shopping/buying things all the time” and “I shop/buy things in order to change my mood.