Retail therapy is alive and well. (It was tested and won during Covid.) And although its benefits are temporary, I have to remember that’s the game. We’re programmed to keep shopping, and playing.

It Wasn’t Always this Way

Once upon a time, retail therapy was a foreign term. People lived frugally, writes Yval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In fact, for most of history, they avoided luxuries, didn’t waste food, and repaired their clothes rather than buy new ones. 

Prior to the retail therapy mantra, scarcity was the belief system—and the reality—by the lower classes. It was also morally ethical. (Think the Puritans.) For the upper class, writes Harari, it was a different story. They could afford such luxuries, and they did and flaunted those luxuries. 

Then, the Story Changed

Centuries later, when the Upper Class invested in the Industrial Revolution and goods were produced at breakneck speed, those in industry faced a market challenge, writes Harari. The challenge: who will buy all the goods produced so we can continue to grow economically? Enter shopping and its stepchild, retail therapy. It was a simple solution to a market problem. 

This solution demanded a flip-flop in the social story and its underlying belief. The old belief was that scarcity was a fact of life (except for the rich) and that frugality was not only socially responsible but also ethically moral. The new belief, and story, was its opposite. 

But It’s Still the Same Game 

The problem with the new story is that it’s a bait-and-switch. It’s still the old story (of oppression) with an old belief (“we—the rich—dictate the game and the rules”) but with a modern narrative (shopping and retail therapy are good for you).

And like all good narratives of oppression, refined over time and threaded into a culture, its tentacles become our beliefs and our story. “I deserve this, after all, we say,” even as we are doing little more than lip-syncing the cultural story.

How to Change the Game

If you’re caught in the loop of retail therapy this season, do what Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, suggests. Redefine shopping to include the social and environmental value of things. 

Indeed, when I purchase something that is “Oregon made,” or talk with the owner of my favorite local restaurant, I feel a “retail therapy” buzz down to my toes. And that buzz outlasts any mindless retail therapy at a big box store.

M. Carolyn Miller, MA, designs narrative- and game-based learning. She also writes and speaks about the power of story in our lives and world. www.cultureshape.com