Washington Post article
Frugality falling out of fashion?
A returning hunger for retail therapy thaws out the credit card
By Annie Gowen
Monday, October 19, 2009




Aba Kwawu vowed she'd buy only one or two classic pieces for work that would last her for years. So what was she doing recently at the cash register of a Washington boutique, credit card in hand, agonizing over whether to buy a flashy designer purse with faux snake trim?

"I don't need anything. I don't need a bag," Kwawu said, and sighed. She barely looked at the pricey but practical gray sweater coat she was supposed to be buying, already wrapped in an elaborate origami of tissue at her elbow. She only had eyes for the $695 green-and-black handbag next to it that looked so cute when she slung it over her shoulder and twirled in front of the mirror a few minutes earlier.

When the recession slowed business at her public relations firm, the Silver Spring fashionista put herself on a strict spending diet. She avoided online retailers and her favorite Georgetown haunts. She unearthed clothes in her own closet that she had never worn, some with the tags still on.

After about six months, however, her virtue has begun to feel like a heavy cloak she longs to cast off.

"I had not shopped in so long I was going through withdrawal," said Kwawu, 34. "I thought, 'I have to get something now. I've been good long enough.' "

Malls and boutiques are filled with people such as Kwawu these days, shoppers who have cut their spending -- some drastically -- during the downturn and are now suffering from what some call "frugal fatigue."

Most ardent shoppers don't seem to be giving in to their cravings yet: Consumer spending was sluggish last month, and credit card debt is waning. But with the Dow topping 10,000 just last week and the air filled with talk of recovery, it's getting harder for some people to keep suppressing the urge.

"I want to shop!" cried a frustrated Gillian Joseph, 42, of McLean, leaving Marshalls in Pentagon City empty-handed last week.

Joseph, a widow and mother of a young son, quit shopping "cold turkey" a year ago when her investments lost half their value.

For someone who used to blow $100 every time she walked into Target, "it was a sad and scary time," she said. "I'm a shopaholic. I love to shop."

She finally broke her fast, walking into Nordstrom after a long absence and buying a pair of 4 1/2 -inch heels in bright floral colors. The experience was cathartic, she said.

"It was like spring -- rebirth, reawakening."

In recent days, Joseph returned to the stores to buy necessities: a new winter coat and boots. But she said she's determined not to purchase what she's really longing for: new furniture for her home and a silver BMW 5 Series.

Not everyone, however, is strong enough to resist. Some of Lynne Glassman's clients have already started falling off the tightwad wagon when they go into stores with the personal shopper and image consultant.

"They're saying, 'I need to watch it; I can't spend this much.' And then they get there, it's like they've been on a diet for a long time, and they're buying more than they intended," said Glassman, who works in the District.

Christopher Reiter, owner of Muleh, the 14th Street NW boutique where Kwawu was agonizing over the handbag, has noticed the same phenomenon. Lately, some power shoppers come into the store, see something they want and initially decide not to buy it, he said. Then they sneak back in a day or two and get what they tried to leave behind.

"I think people over the last six to eight months have been hiding underneath their kitchen tables," said Paco Underhill, author of the book "Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping" and a marketing consultant. "They've climbed out from underneath their kitchen tables and are recognizing the sky is not going to fall."

Some experts say that Americans, still traumatized by hundreds of thousands of layoffs and plummeting home values, might never return to spendthrift ways.

But others say deep and lasting change might prove challenging in a country where the phrase "shop 'til you drop" gets 1.7 million Google hits.

Before the downturn, Americans visited a shopping mall at least three times a month, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. Many people shopped for reasons unrelated to need: for comfort, for stress relief, for excitement.

"I don't think we're ever going to go back to shopping as gluttonously as we have in the past, but for competitive sport shoppers, the thrill is waning on abstinence," said Kit Yarrow, a professor of consumer psychology at Golden Gate University in California.

Over the past year, Arash Shirazi, 35, a music agent from Arlington County, saw his income remain steady but his stock portfolio dip. He said "no" to a new MacBook computer, a new Bang & Olufsen stereo and a new Audi S5 -- all of which he would have purchased without a second thought in the pre-recession days.

But now that the stock market is rebounding, he's been itching to buy an Italian diving watch. He has been making trips out to Tysons Galleria to try them on, the heft reassuringly solid on his wrist. It would set him back anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000.

The recession "made everyone sort of take a pause and think about how they spend their money, needs versus wants," Shirazi said. "However, I work all the time. . . . And if you work hard, you like to reward yourself in some capacity."

Exactly, agreed local TV personality Paul Wharton, who cut his maid service and made other economies during the recession.

Wharton recently plunked down more than $1,000 for a pair of python shoes. For him, the shoes are a talisman of better times to come.

"It's almost like I've come out of the recession before the market," he said proudly. "I made a choice! I just refused to be in the recession any longer!"

Kwawu also misses her retail therapy.

"I would have a crazy-tough day with a client, and I'd go to Neiman's. Or on a Saturday afternoon get cupcakes and stroll in here" to Muleh, she said.

In days gone by, Kwawu would think nothing of racking up a four-figure bill in one afternoon at the boutique. But things are different now. When she does shop, she said, she's much more price conscious and less impulsive.

"I want trendy but not ridiculous," she explained. "Now my thought process is: How many times am I really going to wear this? Can I wear it out in the evening?"

Then she saw the olive and black satchel with the gold embossed trim by her favorite designer, Phillip Lim, and her brisk resolve faltered.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm sorry, I have to have this! It's great!" she said, stroking its soft leather. "It's like butter."

She sat on a stool near the counter for several minutes, debating what to do.

"This is where the id and the super ego go, 'Do it. Don't do it,' " she said, mimicking a good angel and a bad angel on each shoulder.

After several minutes of anguish, she handed over her credit card.

The saleswoman wrapped up the purse for Kwawu, who went happily out into the sunlight. The useful gray sweater coat was left behind, forgotten. At least for now.
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Recession's Hidden Virtues
 By Michael Gerson
Friday, February 20, 2009; A23
 There is a minor but raging academic debate taking place over the effect of an economic downturn on your health.

In the traditional view, unemployment can cause a kind of recession flu -- a funk that leads to stress smoking, unhealthy comfort foods and that problematic flu remedy, alcohol. Studies have tied personal financial crises to heart disease, depression and suicide.

There is, however, an unexpected counterargument. Studying decades of public health data, Christopher Ruhm of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro confirmed that a recession increases mental health problems. But he found that physical health actually improves -- about a half-point decline in the death rate for every point of increase in the unemployment rate. During tough economic times, people seem to increase exercise, take fewer car trips, reduce smoking and cook healthier foods at home -- choosing to control the remaining things in their lives that they are capable of controlling.

There is a parallel debate about the influence of economic hard times on the nation's moral health. Without question, the most acute social problems -- crime, illegitimacy, etc. -- are concentrated in areas of highest poverty. But sociologists and criminologists have long pondered an apparent paradox. During the Great Depression -- with about a quarter of Americans out of work -- crime and divorce declined. During the relative prosperity of the 1960s and 1970s, crime rates shot up and families broke down.

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. "One reasonable hypothesis," argues James Q. Wilson, "is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime." Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes -- and that have decayed in our own. The Depression generation controlled the things it could control -- including its own consumption and character.

We see hints of this type of reaction to our current recession, which has such clearly moral causes -- the burst of a bubble inflated by irresponsible debt, consumerism and unaccountable risk-taking. During an economic crisis, Americans return to a language of morality. Perhaps excess and recklessness are vices that deserve social stigma. Perhaps frugality and prudence are personal virtues as well as practices that prevent economic collapse. Perhaps there is a distinction between securing our needs and being dominated by our wants.

It would be difficult for me to recommend asceticism, writing on my miraculous MacBook. But many Americans in this downturn seem to be finding that less costly entertainments such as family time are the most rewarding, that meals at gourmet restaurants are not always the most satisfying and that previously outsourced chores -- from landscaping to parenting to hair dyeing -- might be better performed themselves. (In commenting on this trend to the New York Times, however, one hairstylist cautions, "They do come in sometimes with some pretty orange hair.")

Suspicions about consumerism are being powerfully reinforced by economic realities along with environmental concerns. But the rejection of materialism is finally rooted in a spiritual view of human nature. Pope John Paul II warned of making "people slaves of 'possession' and of immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better." A less material orientation in life (assuming basic material needs are met) actually expands our horizons -- like an escape from the dungeon of our own desires.

It has always been a quiet fear of capitalists that the success of free markets would eventually undermine the moral basis for free markets -- that decadent prosperity would dissolve values such as prudence and delayed gratification. "Capitalism," argued economist Joseph Schumpeter, "creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own."

But capitalism may be self-correcting in this area, as it is in many others. A recession causes suffering that can overwhelm hope. It can also lead to the rediscovery of virtues that make sustained prosperity possible -- and that add nonmaterial richness to our lives. Sometimes grace can arrive through an unexpected door.

michaelgerson@cfr.org

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Don't Buy It
We'll have to curb the urge to splurge, but we can afford a break.
By Judith Levine
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B01
 'Tis the season to be frugal. Two-thirds of American consumers tell pollsters they're cutting way back on their holiday spending. Nearly six in 10 Americans told Pew Research in October that their finances are fair or poor. Jobs are disappearing, personal bankruptcies are proliferating, and if you think your gigantic credit card balance is a problem, wait till you see the next crisis: no new credit at all!

It all gives new meaning to the term Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when hyperactive shopping is supposed to bump retailers' bottom lines into the positive column. And if next Friday is the bummer forecasters are predicting, it will be just another glum day in a long procession of economically and emotionally black Fridays -- and Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays -- to come. Recessions are tough every day. But they feel toughest during the holidays, when generosity and overindulgence are the words of the hour.

Adversity will not make us nicer, more spiritual beings. We are not about to join hands around the globe and start singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" as we watch the Dow plummet. In fact, people are more likely to fight, drink to excess or mug their neighbors when money is tight.

Scarcity depresses us, especially when we don't have that easy (if temporary) pick-me-up of picking up a little something at the shop around the corner. When I read that half of Pew's respondents agreed that "People should learn to live with less," I could hear their voices: righteous or resigned.

Relax. People can learn to live with less -- happily. I know from experience. A few years ago my partner, Paul, and I spent a whole year not shopping. We bought nothing but necessities: basic groceries, Internet access, insulin for our diabetic cat. We forwent the rest: clothes, books, CDs, movies, restaurant meals.

When we described our project to friends, among their mixed reactions (terror, amusement, incredulity) was thanks. Many communicated an attitude the Germans should have a word for, meaning "admiration for an enterprise you are glad someone else is pursuing so you don't have to." And you don't. The good news is, a little moderation can bring a lot of cheer.

The Year Without Shopping occurred to me, like so many rash ideas, at Christmastime. Although I'm a secular Jew, I'd scattered $1,001 on gifts and other holiday odds and ends. As my credit line grew smaller and my shopping bags heavier, I envisioned their contents, along with those of a whole nation, dismissed, disliked and discarded -- and moldering in landfills forever. Then as now, more than two-thirds of the gross domestic product came from consumer spending. There was, and still is, essentially one measure of economic health: growth. But all that growth is outgrowing our finite planet. Ask any economist left or right about this, and he'll write off resource depletion as an "externality," something to worry about later.

I decided to investigate the connection between the personal activity of shopping and the global problem of overconsumption. And I figured that the best way to understand the draw of the marketplace would be to quit it altogether, then see how that felt -- like contemplating a failed marriage from the distance of post-divorce single life. I knew that my no-shopping budget would be on Mother Earth's side. Which side would the macroeconomy eventually be on? Today it's clearer than ever that we'll have to worry about that sooner rather than later.

Paul, a non-shopper, was game with my plan. I got a book contract, and the rest is . . . more complicated than anticipated.

Almost immediately, we learned that both necessity and desire are defined by where, when and among whom we live. A Vietnamese farmer needs a quart of fuel per month to feed his family; a Cleveland commuter may burn 20 gallons of gas in the same time.

The distinction is also personal. If I was going to pay for haircuts, what about hair gel? Toilet paper yes, but Kleenex? Paul and I deemed organic coffee a must-have. But we disagreed on wine. "I'm Italian," he pleaded. "Wine is like milk to me." I raised an eyebrow. He upped the argument: "It's like water!"

We learned that people buy to keep up with the Joneses, although it's not just the Joneses anymore. As the economist Robert H. Frank notes, the media's 24/7 surveillance of the absurdly wealthy entices us to keep up with the Zeta-Joneses and the Gateses. Frank calls this escalation of desire "luxury fever." And the delusion that we can all live like Croesus is partly to blame for the mess we're in today.

Still, shopping is not just something "they" make us do. It provides undeniable pleasure -- and more.

During our cold-turkey year, I was sometimes bored. The British psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls boredom the restless state of waiting to desire. Consumption gives us myriad names for inchoate desire -- and ready objects to allay it. Take away shopping, and you're left with the restlessness.

When we couldn't go out for a beer or a meal with friends, Paul and I felt lonely. When others talked about the latest movies, we sat dumb. I felt out of it. No longer the plugged-in cultural maven, I wasn't myself. In a consumer society, much of our social, cultural and political life -- and even our identities -- is cobbled together from the things and experiences we purchase.

We had to get out of the apartment. So we walked to free concerts and the Brooklyn Public Library. We took in museums on free nights. We trawled the public sphere with gratitude and glee -- but also with dismay, because the public sphere is in sorry shape.

We realized that there are only so many dollars, and they can either go to private consumption -- President Bush's concept of an "ownership society" -- or be invested, through taxes, in the public good. The latter can't just be entered as a personal-finance debit. We should see it as an asset, in the form of highways or health clinics, yes, but also in the feeling that we're in this together, a.k.a. community.

Not shopping connected Paul and me with community in concrete ways. We devoted more time to activism and more money to favorite causes. Meanwhile, I paid off an $8,000 credit card debt without really trying and haven't run it up again. I still shop less than I did. And on more or less the same income, I give away much more money than I used to.

The shopping hiatus reminded me how sweet it is to take home the perfect pair of trousers or sit in a café watching the world. Unless you're a monk, material abstinence does not magnify the spirit. Still, compared with either consumption or abstention, the best soul-grower is social connection.

Which brings me back to the holidays.

By the time December of our non-shopping year rolled around, Paul's and my non-consumer confidence was strong. We knew we could walk away from the seasonal extras -- red-velvet ribbon, champagne flutes, figgy pudding (whatever that is) -- like marathon front-runners easing through a 5K race. But what about gifts? What about parties? Were we going to impose our skinflintery on our loved ones? Did we have to beg off fireside get-togethers just to avoid bringing a box of chocolates?

We did not, and truth be told, we did not want to. We relish lighting up the dark days with giving. But how could we give without getting and spending? How could we celebrate without adding to the global litter?

I got a clue from the past. The midwinter holidays originate in pagan rites to seduce the sun back from the underworld. Doing that requires excess -- gorging, reveling and giving.

In this spirit, Paul and I throw an annual Hanukkah Latke Bash, the no-shopping year not excepted. We load the table with dozens of potato pancakes plus vats of sour cream and homemade applesauce and plates of smoked fish. Our guests arrive with libations, load their plates and eat until a stupor descends upon the room. Our feast is cheap -- basically the food of the shtetl. And all that's left in the end is (compostable) bones.

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough," wrote Blake. Now think celebration, not shopping. Because in spite -- no, because -- of the economic gloom, it is our duty, and can be our pleasure, to make the season as festive today as in the fattest times.

judith@judithlevine.com



Judith Levine is the author of "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping."

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