My friends mother was a compulsive shopper. This was in high school, before the clinical social disorders we know today. A sufferer of ADHD was known simply as spaz, and shoplifting or cutting yourself got you a beating, not a prescription. I used to like hanging around the house over there because the "impulsive - compulsive buying disorder" would manifest itself mostly in grocery shopping. Everyday, sometimes several times a day, her mother would come home with carloads of groceries. Not cheap shit either, no double coupons or half off bakery items, it was full price fancy cereals and snacks. Big shiny boxes with smiling kids and moms or hip cartoon critters with hats on sideways bursting with food attitude. I would help carry all this stuff inside - bags and bags of it - then I could have all the die cut processed chicken treats and Hot Pop'em's™ I could eat. Many times I was given stuff to take with me to help make room for tomorrows haul. Being very ignorant, I thought this was the most wonderful thing in the whole world.
It wasn't until much later that I realized the scope of the shame of this problem. These weren't rich people. Vain, yes. They had a lot of nice things and a big house, but they got it all with credit, they didn't actually own any of it. I was there for the delight of carrying in the groceries and tearing open the bags, but I didn't get to see the father come home from work to see all his hard earned money converted into groceries that would go bad and crap from the mall. He would get bullshit and make her take it all back to the store. You can imagine what that must be like, to take a whole carload of groceries back to the service desk and ask a high school drop out to redeem your money. She was too ashamed to go back to that supermarket and had to go a few towns over.
The spoof ad for spoof drug Dolorax at the top of the page appeared in Adbusters circa 2001. It claimed to be the clinical cure for consumption and was styled cleverly after the barrage of psychotropic drugs that were flooding the market. Though probably not intended to be prescience, this very moment research is being done on a synthetic drug that will do what Dolorax advertised. A study was completed and its findings were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (I get it for the recipes) which found that one person in twenty are compulsive shoppers. It was even suggested that the condition be added to the DSM, since it is the cause of so many social, psychological and financial problems for sufferers. After all, gambling and drinking are regarded as social problems and they have similar effects to compulsive shopping, but it isn't really taken seriously because people assume it only affects rich women. Overconsumption hurts all classes, often being the cause of financial ruin or credit catastrophes. Men, as it turns out, also have a compulsive shopping problem, but because it is emasculating little attention is paid to it. Anti-depressants were helpful in treating compulsive shoppers, suggesting that maybe the problem is a symptom of something else, like deep depression, and should be treated that way.
