READY, FIRE, AIM: She Went Shopping

I’ll buy you a diamond ring, my friend
If it makes you feel alright…

— Can’t Buy Me Love, by Lennon/McCartney

The Recession is already trending on TikTok, now that the Congressionally-mandated ban of the Chinese app has delayed until at least June. Among the advice from influencers:

Make shopping lists and stick to them. Include cheap, quick and versatile tuna on said shopping lists.

Presumably, they are talking here about ‘canned tuna’. Frozen tuna is versatile, but neither cheap nor quick. But there might be a better way to get through the recession. Stop shopping altogether.

When I inspect my closet with an open mind, I find that I already have some clothes hanging there. And some shoes. And in my socks drawer, some socks.

I did an inventory of my kitchen cabinets, and calculated that I could survive for a month or more without another trip to the grocery store. Granted, I would have to eat some foods, discovered in the back of the cabinet, that expired in 2018. But, I mean, did they actually ‘expire’?  Or did the manufacturers just want to fool me into spending more money?

There’s just one big problem. Shopping makes people feel good. Or at least, certain people. I know that it made my ex-wife Darlene feel good. And I imagine it made the VISA card company feel good.

Some of us want to be fooled into throwing out the expired food.

Here’s Anne Helen Petersen, writing about “The Shopping Cure” on Substack.

When I was at my most burnt out pre-pandemic, traveling constantly for reporting, working all the time, the muscle under my eye twitching almost constantly, still without the language to describe what I was doing to myself, the one thing that would temporarily calm me down was buying shit.

Not in massive quantities, and not clothes. Just things that seemed like they would fix small problems, fill small lacks: a puzzle dog bowl, a lemon squeezer, an extra set of sheets because operating with one is a recipe for sleeping at least one night on the mattress pad, a pair of headphones to replace the broken ones, a bathroom drawer organizer, a couch de-piller.

None of these purchases were pressing or even, ultimately, necessary. They were a coping mechanism: a moment of fleeting calm within the larger, barely controlled chaos.

People tend to blame Capitalism and its henchman, the Advertising Industry, for causing the nation’s addiction to shopping. I dare to place the blame elsewhere.

For much of human history, “shopping” happened in the village marketplace, probably on a daily basis for most women, because without refrigerators and preservatives like BHA and BHT, most foods were best purchased the same day they would be eaten. Moldy cheese was an obvious exception, because you wanted it to be moldy.

The village marketplace also featured apparel, of course, and specialty items. Pots and pans, perhaps. Maybe some used books. (Romance novels, for example.)

This daily routine of shopping — so necessary for much of human history — became embedded in female DNA, and even though women no longer need to shop on a daily basis, they still need to shop on a daily basis.

This was not so much of a problem until the mid-1990s, when two auspicious events took place. The first was 抓大放小, better known in English-speaking countries as “Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small.” Under the leadership of President Jiang Zemin, the Chinese Communist Party decided to focus on efforts to convert the nation’s largest enterprises into well-subsidized state-owned corporations, and hand off the small manufacturers to the private sector.

Shoppers over here in the U.S. have benefited from that effort. We’ve been able to buy more shit than ever.

Shoppers also benefited, around that same time, from an effort by a computer engineer named Jeff Bezos, when he started an online bookstore in a rented garage, and named it “Amazon”.

Now here we are, in 2025, grasping the small and letting go of the large.

A few more comments from Anne Helen Petersen:

Which returns us to the dumb purchases I would make at 7pm in a hotel room while eating a broccoli and cheddar Hot Pocket on the road. I was lonely and overworked and ungrounded. What I really needed was community. A support system, but also a source of value — a life axis — other than work…

Money I had, if not in abundance. But the wherewithal to invest in other people — that I did not, or at least did not feel like I did.

So I chose to buy…

I would never want to suggest that shopping addiction is only a female problem.

That is to say, I want to suggest it — want to shout it from the housetops, actually — but I would never want to want to suggest it.

Just like I wouldn’t want to suggest that being emotionally unavailable is a male problem.

‘Cause I don’t care too much for money
Money can’t buy me love…