Is “Retail Therapy” Gone Forever?
By Cheryl Harbour

Retail therapy is defined as “shopping to make oneself feel better.” People joke about it, but probably most of us have indulged now and then. Traditionally, it involves getting out of the house, strolling through a favorite store, touching, imagining, trying on and, sometimes -- but not always – buying. It’s so much more than conspicuous consumption. It’s diversion, exercise, tactile and visual stimulation. It can even be social…if you like mingling with strangers.

But now, if Black Friday and Cyber Monday are any indication, the days of retail therapy may be coming to an end. Or at, least, the concept has changed dramatically.

This year’s Cyber Monday turned out to be the biggest online shopping day in history with a record-breaking $6.59 billion in purchases -- while visits to stores on Black Friday fell 4 percent from 2016.

A survey by the National Retail Federation coming into the holiday season found that 59% of shoppers planned to shop online this year. That means for the first time, online shopping will be more popular than shopping in stores.

According to an article on cnn.com, this could be a “make or break year” for many retailers. If store closures and bankruptcies are any indication, our retail options are dwindling before our eyes. In 2017, more than 6,700 stores have closed or announced they will close. That’s a record number and three times the number of stores that closed in 2016. That’s not all -- 620 retailers have filed for bankruptcy this year.

For most people, a shopping trip to improve a mood is harmless and it really does work. Researchers studied the psychological effects by interviewing shoppers at a mall and asking them to keep diaries of their purchases and their positive or negative feelings after they made a purchase. One of these studies, published in the Journal of Psychology and Marketing, concluded: “Retail therapy purchases were overwhelmingly beneficial, leading to mood boosts and no regrets or guilt.” Only when taken to extremes, when shopping becomes an addiction and leads people to spend money they don’t have, does shopping become a problem.

(In this vein, full disclosure: In 1986, I wrote a humor book titled The Joy of Shopping: The World’s Second Oldest Obsession under the pseudonym Elizabeth Hanson. It was not about serious addiction, but about the challenges and harmless pleasures of shopping. The publisher Turnbull & Willoughby no longer exists – but I was amazed to see the book still does.)

So, if the trend toward online shopping continues, we may miss all those stores when they’re gone. And we may have to acquire cyber shopping skills when we want to acquire new possessions.  

What does online retail therapy look like? You sleep late, grab a cup of coffee, sit at the computer in your bathrobe, search, select, pay, and you’re finished...all before breakfast.  It’s efficient – but is it fun?

Note: As the shopping experience changes, some very good shoppers may need to learn new tricks. Here’s a brief video on how not to get scammed when you shop online.

 




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