Shopping is Not Therapy

Retail therapy was first used as a term in the 1980s with the first reference being this sentence in the Chicago Tribune of Christmas Eve 1986. "We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy."  Wikipedia

 

Shopping is not therapy, neither is it entertainment - at least for those who have fed into this particular con, those who do the shopping.  Rather than being therapy or entertainment for us, it really is excitement and a thrill for those who receive our money.  For us, it's a temporary pleasure, an attempt to fill a void created by a lack of work / life balance or a life that is out of balance. 

 

The dictionary definition of therapy:

1. Treatment of illness or disability.

2. Psychotherapy.

3. Healing power or quality.

 

Therapy is something that treats or heals.  If you put retail before therapy, as in 'retail therapy', it becomes all about retail and not really about therapy.  Spending time to buy things you don't need, with money you don't have - locking you into extra hours in a job you don't love and away from the people you do, does that sound like therapy?  As a matter of fact, it sounds more like the exact opposite, the evil therapist taking advantage of an unstable patient under his care. 

 

Retail therapy is a quick hit of pleasure, followed by pain.  It's that second bottle of wine, great that night, hell in the morning.  It's that extra hour lying in the sun on your first day of vacation, and that painful, red body the next. 

 

It's also your time, not only in the time used for shopping, but the time one must 'spend' to earn the money for shopping.  Do you want to be earning money for shopping or living?

 

In the retailer / shopper relationship, the only one getting therapy is the retailer, that great theraputic pleasure of counting the money that we continuously spend...