Shopping can be a fun thing to do with friends once in a while, but too much shopping can be very harmful for both teens and their bank accounts. As online shopping has become more popular for teenagers, shopping has become easier to do anytime, anywhere.
Shopping addictions can be problematic for teenagers because they can abuse their use of money or debit cards, leading them to spend their money on things they don’t need.
“I shop till I have no more money left,” Ava Hayes, junior, said.
There are also social structures that add to the need for shopping. There are constantly ‘new’ items that need to be purchased in order to fit into society’s standards, such as ‘fast fashion’ and the repetition of ‘wanting’ a new/trendy product.
TikTok and Instagram have become outlets for advertisements of new products, making it pop up on someone’s feed, and having them feel like they need to buy that new product. As the majority of the consumers of these social media outlets are teenagers, they are very easily influenced by what they see on social media.
“I go shopping 2-3 times a week,” Lucy Hindle, Arrowhead Junior, said.
In addition, there are often lots of mental health issues associated with excessive shopping such as stress and anxiety.
According to PubMed Central, “significant psychiatric comorbidity, particularly mood and anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, eating disorders, and other disorders of impulse control” are some of the mental health issues that excessive shopping creates.
There are many Arrowhead students who shared their experiences behind their shopping.
According to Women’s Wear Daily, a survey conducted by Qualtrics said that “sixty-nine percent of those who admitted to having a shopping addiction blame social media for fueling their bad habits, with half calling out Instagram, 46 percent calling out YouTube and 44 percent calling out TikTok shop as the ‘top enablers”’.
The #hauls have also become a very popular trend on social media where teenagers post weekly or sometimes daily hauls on their $1,000 budget.
Although there are benefits to online shopping, there are also many preventative measures to stop overspending such as setting boundaries of how much money a person can spend and taking into consideration how much things she already has.
