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I Gave Up Online Shopping for 30 Days. The Results Surprised Me
How a one-month detox tested my willpower, challenged my spending habits and revealed ways to cut back
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Key takeaways
- A 30-day ban on online shopping showed the writer how dependent she had become on ordering everything from groceries to pet medications.
- Many online retailers track shoppers’ spending habits and search history, using the data to send the consumer ads for products they’ve shown interest in.
- Putting distance between yourself and your smartphone — say, placing it in a separate room at night — can reduce the temptation to kill time by shopping online.
I thought it would be a fun experiment. I’d already survived a month paying for everything with cash earlier this year. How hard could it be to go 30 days without shopping on the internet?
But giving up online shopping for all of June — while planning a summer trip to Europe — proved a much tougher challenge. I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on ordering everything from groceries and clothes to household supplies and my dog’s medications online.
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The hopefulness I felt at the outset about supporting local businesses and choosing intentionality over impulse buying quickly faded when, during the first week of the experiment, I found a tick on my dog, Ziggy. Rather than reordering the topical preventative I’d bought last summer on Chewy.com, I had to trek to my vet’s office on a steamy-hot day to purchase the product — and paid nearly $20 more than I would have if Chewy had delivered it to my door.
Each time that I had to stop myself from ordering something online — from the watermelon-cucumber beverage that’s hard to find in grocery stores but readily available on Amazon to the tub of dishwasher tabs my family tears through every month — I felt a mix of frustration, anxiety and restlessness.
Carrie Rattle, a financial therapist and coauthor of the forthcoming book To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop, helped to explain the unexpected torrent of emotions. “Just as when you’re trying to stop smoking, your mind craves the spike of dopamine — the feel-good hormone it gets from the behavior — and your body responds by feeling tightness in your stomach, clenching or other discomfort,” she says.
The dopamine rush doesn’t result from the purchase itself. “The hunting part of our brain spikes when something’s new, when there’s uncertainty about what comes next, when there are cues predicting a possible reward,” says Edward Spector, a psychologist who specializes in the compulsive use of technology. “Dopamine is like a slot machine before you’ve won.”
The allure of nighttime shopping
One behavior I set out to curb was my propensity to impulse-shop between 9 and 11 p.m. I’m usually able to resist the siren call of ads in my social feeds during the day, but as I unwind at night, my resolve weakens and savvy marketers’ promises to restore my skin’s youthful glow, whiten my coffee-stained teeth or thicken my thinning brows sound too good to pass up.
I’m not alone. In a recent survey by Eachnight, a platform that provides resources and support for better sleep, 68 percent of Gen Xers and 58 percent of boomers said they had made an online purchase after their typical bedtime in the previous 12 months. The average amount spent on late-night purchases across all age groups was $165.
To preempt late-night spending, I kept a few books on my nightstand and powered down all electronics before reading myself to sleep.
‘You are being stalked’
When it comes to the algorithms that work behind the scenes, like puppeteers pulling at our purse strings, Rattle does not mince words. “You are being stalked,” she says. “In real life, stalking is against the law. Online, it’s perfectly acceptable.”
Many online retailers use analytics to track your spending habits, including monitoring your search history. As a result, “you get reminder messages saying you have items in your cart. You get served ads consistently,” Rattle says. “The more you look at similar products or brands, the more you’re fed temptation.”
Indeed, the more often you see a product, the more familiar and appealing it becomes — and the more likely you are to hit Buy. This is what behavioralists refer to as the “mere exposure effect.”
The effect is exacerbated because “online shopping is frictionless,” Rattle notes. Often, “your credit card is on file. One click and you’re done.”
I experienced this while traveling to South Carolina midway through my experiment. The free Wi-Fi on the flight proved both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, I got work done. But I also procrastinated by reading an article in a daily newsletter I receive that had editors’ picks for wardrobe basics. And who doesn’t need a new white T-shirt, particularly when it’s a good buy?
After viewing a $12 T-shirt, I found myself comparing it to a much more expensive version. Within seconds, I was mentally justifying buying the cheaper one. (“Even if it falls apart after a few washes, I can purchase seven more for what the $98 one costs.”)
Fortunately, Rattle’s warnings about frictionless shopping rang like a grade school recess bell in my head, so I shut my laptop and napped instead. Victory!
How retailers exploit our desire to belong
What leads consumers to make impulse purchases they often regret? For Paco de Leon, a Los Angeles-based business management consultant and author of Finance for the People, the answer is less economic than anthropological.
“One of the things that has allowed us to survive over time is our ability to size ourselves up against the other people in a group,” she says. Social media magnifies that impulse, she adds: “We look at who’s going on vacation in Italy, who bought a house, what kind of furniture they have, what kind of clothes they wear.”
Bingo! Ever since I started planning a summer vacation to Italy and Greece, my feed has been filled with gauzy white dresses, straw bags and silk scarves. “It’s easy for us to get swept up in that emotion of ‘I want to belong to this group, so I’ll spend here,’ ” says de Leon. “It’s like if you don’t buy this product, you’re not a part of that group.”
This explains why, in the third week of my experiment, my defenses weakened, and I bought not one item online but three — a statement necklace, a straw bag and a pair of linen shorts. (I didn’t need the shorts, but they qualified me for free shipping.)
The fact that I was unfamiliar with the website should have been a red flag, but the product photographs looked professional. It wasn’t until I started tracking the shipment that I realized the package was coming from China. When I received the merchandise nearly two weeks later, I was stuck with three shoddy items that I never would have purchased if I’d seen them in person first.
Perhaps that was my punishment for letting my guard down. I wouldn’t do it again — at least until my 30 days were up.
Strategies to curb online spending
Here are some of my favorite expert-recommended tips for cutting back on online purchases.
Adopt a “touch before you buy” mindset. Ditching screens and shopping at brick-and-mortar stores can make you more present and mindful in your decision-making. Shopping in person also allows you to touch products and assess their workmanship. (Case in point: the shoddy shorts.)
Take a beat. Before making a purchase online, consider leaving it in your cart for 24 to 48 hours. “This gets rid of the emotional roller coaster you experience when you scroll through your feed,” de Leon says, and gives you a chance to reflect on why the purchase is important or necessary.
Use a productivity app. Rattle says apps that block access to certain websites or apps on your smartphone, either all day or at specific times, can help reduce discretionary spending. Three popular ones are Freedom, Opal and the aptly named Cold Turkey.
Put your phone out of reach. Adding distance between yourself and your smartphone can make it less tempting to shop online when you’re looking to kill time. “When you walk into your house, dump it in a pretty box by the door, and put it in a drawer at work,” Rattle says. At night, she suggests, keep your phone outside of the bedroom. If you use it to wake yourself up in the morning, “buy an alarm clock instead.”
I took that advice to heart. The first thing I bought after my experiment ended wasn’t another white dress — it was an alarm clock.
Rattle convinced me that cutting back on online shopping isn’t just about saving money — it’s also about reclaiming time, attention and mental space.
Buying an alarm clock is one small step in my ongoing effort to spend less time shopping on my phone and more time using it for creative pursuits, like snapping colorful photos on the city streets during my daily walks or improving my Spanish by downloading a language app before my annual winter excursion to Mexico.
These pursuits help renew my energy — and they make me feel better about recharging my iPhone when the battery runs low. Now, I know I’m putting it to good use.
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