Unopened shopping bags? You might be a compulsive buyer

BY JOAN TUPPONCE

The spending habits of women are at the heart of many jokes, but sometimes the spending habits of individuals are no laughing matter. 

Nancy Ridgway, associate professor of marketing in the Robins School of Business, has been studying consumers who shop too much as well as those who buy too much, for more than 20 years. Her first article on the subject was published in 1986 in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Her latest article for the journal, co-authored by Monika Kukar-Kinney, assistant professor of marketing, and Kent B. Monroe of the University of Illinois and the Robins School, focuses on her team’s research regarding compulsive buying. Some of the findings detailed in the December 2008 article also appeared in BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal.

Ridgway was intrigued by the subject because of her own interest in shopping and buying. “I enjoy buying clothing and accessories,” she says.

She believes that shopping as a hobby can, in some cases, transition into compulsive buying. “There are many people who shop but don’t buy,” she explains. “I think that is a really important distinction. Compulsive buyers buy too much. There is a big difference between the two.”

In the current research, Ridgway looked at a compulsive buying scale that was created 20 years ago. Four of the seven items on the scale dealt with the financial consequences of excessive buying. Ridgway and her team wanted to take a different approach in creating their scale so they decided to include shoppers who could afford their shopping habit as well as shoppers who couldn’t by taking out financially based items.

“Other scales include consequences—like credit card debt—in the scale itself, rather than measuring the behavior as we did and then relating [the behavior] to the consequences and the possible causes,” she explains. “In our three samples, we found 15.5 percent, 8.9 percent and 16 percent were compulsive buyers. This is a much higher percentage than has been found in the past.”

Ridgway believes the increased percentage was a result of taking the debt items out of the scale. That helped the team identify those who can and those who cannot afford their shopping habit.

Determining how to measure compulsive buying tendencies was one of the team’s biggest challenges, according to Kukar-Kinney. The team wanted its measure to be applicable to a general population of consumers. “Further, we wanted to be able to identify compulsive buyers by their underlying behavioral tendencies, rather than consequences of this behavior,” she explained.

The team’s research theorizes that compulsive buying is a part of two disorders—obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder and impulse control disorder, where a person can’t control the urge to buy. “We think that compulsive buying is a disorder,” Ridgway says. “But over-shopping is not considered a disorder. There are a lot of people who are mall rats.”

Culturally, women are considered to be more ardent spenders than men. However, men can be equally guilty when it comes to compulsive buying. “My theory is that men collect things,” Ridgway says. “Women are more prone to buy clothing.”

While working on their research on compulsive buying, Ridgway and her team became interested in people who spend excessive amounts on their pets. Their article “Does excessive buying for self relate to spending on pets?” was published in the Journal of Business Research in 2007.

“We had the idea that if compulsive buyers were buying for themselves, then they were also buying for their pets,” Ridgway says. “We found out that was the case.”

The team discovered that compulsive buyers spend almost double the amount on their pets that non-compulsive buyers spend during an average month. They also found that pet owners spent more on dogs than cats.

Ridgway, who owns two Jack Russell terriers—her 12-year-old Jack Russell, Sadie, passed away during the course of the study— knows how attached owners are to their pets. “You’ll see people spending on all different kinds of things for their pets, such as multiple leashes, carriers and outfits,” she says. “They seem to like to dress up their pets. They buy special collars for every holiday.”

The team was able to get data for its study by sampling one Internet retailer who agreed to share spending data with the researchers. “We were able to match each person with their spending,” Ridgway says.

Kukar-Kinney has found the research both interesting and fun.   She enjoys working with Ridgway. “Nancy’s expertise is more in the theoretical background for this project, while mine is more in the methodological area, so we were both able to learn a lot from each other as well as from our third co-author, Kent Monroe,” she says.

The question as to why people overspend still intrigues Ridgway who will admit she has an unopened shopping bag or two in her own closet. “We found that compulsive buyers experience temporary positive feelings after a buying binge,” she says. “It’s interesting. I wonder what people do with all these things?”