My shopping addiction is embarrassing

Apparently, I spent £428.65 on shopping last month. The insights tool on my banking app glowed in accusation. How was this possible? I frantically scrolled through my spending history. Amazon. Lucy & Yak. Klarna. £8.99 for a book here. £13.99 for a pack of earrings there. Small, impulsive purchases that felt inconsequential in the moment now totalled an obscene amount. I checked the month before last and actually gasped. Another £373.19 on shopping? When the hell did I spend £62 at Marks & Spencer, and on what?!

I am not rich, even though my record says I think I am. I’m at a point in my life where I really should be saving. I’m in a serious relationship, and sooner or later that’s going to mean spending serious money on serious things, like a mortgage, or a sofa, or a cat. So why did I just drop £129.99 on a robot hoover?

I didn’t used to spend like this. The biggest drain on my finances nowadays is clothes, which is funny to me because I used to hate fashion. Some of my worst arguments with my mum were between the ages of 12 to 15 during Boxing Day sales in Belfast city centre. I’d glower as I followed her around the high street, where she spent hours hunting through bargain racks and making me try on various tops and jeans. I hated looking at my lumpy teenage body in the dusty changing room mirrors at Next. I never wore make-up and considered myself superior to my Abercrombie & Fitch-loving classmates. In the years since, my mum has described me as going into a ‘black mood’ every time she took me shopping.

Things changed in university, when a) my lumpy body finally smoothed out in the right places, and b) I lived with girls who taught me that shopping was fun. But I was a broke student, living off loans, birthday money from my granny, and whatever I saved from my summer job at Costa. As often as I’d browse Penney’s (the Irish Primark) on O’Connell Street, I usually borrowed my housemate’s clothes instead of buying my own. Later, I spent a year interning in New York, where I was on such a tight budget that I once bought seven packs of noodles from Dollar Tree as my dinner for the week. So when I moved to London and got my first proper job - a £28k salary thank you very much - I went into a giddy over-spending spree.

It started the day I got my first pay cheque. I went to Topshop on Oxford Street (RIP) and bought £50 jeans. Then a £10 top. Then a £45 dress. Tapping my card at the register, I felt a little headrush. I was hooked. Soon I was signing up for Prime membership and unpacking boxes of books and candles and cushion covers and plant pots. I was shopping at Zara and buying Adidas trainers just because I could. Each hit to my bank balance felt like taking a bump.

Even now, I don’t think that thrill of being able to finally ‘afford’ stuff has ever gone away. I love the feeling of new clothes. I love their smell and how they slide perfectly folded out of the brown paper packages they arrive in. I love wearing them out for the first time. I love the compliments. As much as I keep trying to purge my wardrobe, my drawers are always full.

Sometimes the big things I’m saving for seem so far off that dipping into my interest-free overdraft doesn’t feel like a huge deal. I’m also impulsive, and easily influenced. I bought the £129.99 robot vacuum after precisely one conversation with a girl who told me she loved ‘always having clean floors’. I said, ‘me, too’, then went tap-tap on Amazon Prime, and now we have a robot.

But after seeing my recent spending, I was forced to acknowledge something I’ve been ignoring for a while now. This wasn’t the occasional impulse buy. This was a pattern.

Turns out, it’s not normal to collect so many Lucy & Yak points that you now own 10 pairs of dungarees, 8 jumpsuits and 4 fleeces. It’s thrifty to sign up for a newsletter to get 20% off in-store, but not so much when you use four different emails at the same store in one month. Last year, I fell asleep watching so many YouTube videos of perfume influencers listing notes that I bought 24 bottles. Then because I still wanted to keep buying but couldn’t justify any more for myself, I re-directed the impulse into getting my boyfriend a £238 bottle of Le Labo - a big upgrade from his old £30 CK One.

My now expensive smelling boyfriend gently sat me down last month after I purchased my tenth pair of Lucy & Yak dungarees and said he was concerned. We looked at his £13.85 shopping spend compared with my £428.65 outgoings. I squirmed like I’d been caught on camera doing coke.

So I promised him, ‘I am no longer spending money on stuff I don’t need’. I deleted the Lucy & Yak app and the ASOS app and other sources of temptation from my phone. My willpower was immediately tested when a colleague complimented another colleague’s new polo shirt from Cos, which led to me googling polo shirt trends autumn 2025, which made me really want to buy a polo shirt. Against my better judgment, I walked to Cos after work. They didn’t have my size in stock. I tried the next size up. Maybe I could wear it as a loose fit? I fingered the £65 price tag. The sales assistant asked if I needed any help. I really did. My eyes darted around the surrounding racks. I felt sweaty. I shouldn’t be here. I was making myself late to the comedy gig I was supposed to be hosting that night. I took a breath, and walked out of the shop.

And you could say there is nothing wrong with buying a polo shirt if you have the money and that top will genuinely become a staple in your wardrobe - but I bet it won’t. While writing this, I told ChatGPT I owned 10 pairs of dungarees and it said this is ‘usually more than most people need’.

But it’s tough out there for a shopping addict. As a woman I’m the target audience of every consumer brand out there. I’ve read about ‘doom spending’ and ‘treat culture’. I hate how completely cliché I am in the way I buy small things for instant gratification now, without thinking about how it will impact me later. I totally get the logic of ‘well I’ll never be able to own a house, so why not buy the robot now’. I’m susceptible to the same patterns of thinking that lead people to build debt through Klarna, and well-practiced in ‘girl math’.

But I’ve got to change. By saying it here, I am publicly holding myself accountable. If you see me at a comedy gig wearing a new polo shirt, don’t you dare compliment me. It will only make things harder.