When the Shopping Gene and Guilt Gene Collide in Women

Isometimes wonder how much better off the retail industry would be if women didn’t feel so guilty about shopping. Extrapolating from all the purchases I’ve abandoned at the last minute because I just hated the way I felt, the difference would be pretty substantial.

Do all women feel shopping guilt? I’ve found a few who never do, and I’ve tried to learn from them. For some, the guilt is sporadic. But I’ve discovered that the mildly tense to outright sick feeling I often get when I’m shopping, which I long thought was just my own neurosis, is very common. Many women feel guilty about shopping, whether it’s for fashion, food, flowers, furniture or face creams.

Why else would we leave our shopping bags in the trunk until after dark or sneak in our purchases with the dry-cleaning?

In a totally unscientific polling of various friends, acquaintances and co-workers, a few themes emerged. Among the most obvious was the difference between men and women and their reactions to shopping. Here’s how my conversations generally started:

Me: “I’m doing a column on shopping guilt.”

Friend/acquaintance, female: groan of recognition.

Friend/acquaintance, male: “What’s that?”

The gender difference could be chalked up to the fact that women do a bit more shopping than men. But I believe, as do most of the women I talked to, that the guilt associated with shopping is gender-specific.

Like so many of my friends, I’m acutely aware of the messages from society that say I should be more frugal, more selfless, more aware of the environment, more careful about planning for my daughter’s education and my own retirement.

But those messages conflict with the seductive desire to look good, to have smooth skin, to smell nice--virtues certainly acclaimed every bit as much in popular culture. So frequently, when a woman does succumb to a purchase, she judges herself critically, against the more sensible messages from her husband, her mother or her favorite personal-finance columnist. The resulting guilt takes all forms.

There’s time guilt: “I feel guilty for the time it takes, knowing I’m leaving my husband with the kids,” said one friend, a government lawyer.

There’s self-indulgence guilt: “I love flowers, but I feel so guilty every time I bring flowers into the house, like I should be spending my money on other things,” said a professional with mostly grown children.

There’s stupidity guilt: “I’ll tell you where the guilt is: the skin products,” whispered another friend, a writer and artist whose husband was in earshot. “Because the skin products are expensive, and they probably don’t work. But there’s always hope.”

One woman said she feels guilty over her high grocery bill, but her husband is a different story: “He comes home the other day with a flat-panel computer screen and never gives it another thought.”

Another friend said her husband is “so methodical that when he figures out something he needs, it’s a far less emotional experience.”

I asked the folks at the American Psychological Assn. if they knew anyone who had studied shopping guilt and the apparent gender split in attitudes about buying.

“Well, let’s see,” said the nice woman in the public relations office. “I can give you our shopping people, or I can give you our guilt people.”

It was a “guilt” person who seemed to really nail it for me. Lawrence Josephs, a psychology professor at Adelphi University on Long Island, said he sees big differences in spending attitudes among patients in his private practice. Both sexes feel guilt about spending money, but women feel guilty about the impact on present-day activities while men feel guilty about whether they’re managing their finances well enough to prepare for the future.

“I think men don’t connect the dots. They spend money without guilt in the present, but they have a lot of neurotic worries about having money in the future, and they don’t see any connection between those two behaviors,” Josephs said. “I would see the reverse with women. Women often don’t worry as much as the men in the family about the future, but worry about the present spending.”