Breaking the Shopping Cycle: Step 1
Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. Remove yourself from all retail-related email lists, stop following fashion influencers and brands with shoppable links on Instagram, and even cancel the catalogs you receive in the mail.
Step 1 in Suzanne Zuckerman’s casual guide to breaking the shopping cycle is a mercifully simple step: just unsubscribe from all versions of direct retail marketing. Simple yes, but not necessarily easy when you’re a problematic shopper.
Rewind to December, right after Black Friday, when I decided it was time to take control of my shopping. The first action I took was to start unsubscribing from the various retail email lists for which I’d signed up over the years.
Retail email lists are rather insidious things - they’re always free to join and typically reward you with a little perk for doing so. I mean, why wouldn’t I share my email address to get free shipping or a 10-15% discount on my first order? But the retailer wins in the long run. With my signup, they’ve reserved a space for themselves in my inbox, sometimes on a multiple-times-per-week basis, to show off their newest arrivals or their latest can’t-miss sale. Even when I don’t think I need or want anything new, they land in my inbox to make the case for just how wrong I am. It’s easy to not want for things when you don’t even know they exist for the wanting; but once something wantable enters your consciousness, denying its wantability becomes a game of will power, something that most of us humans just aren’t that good at.
So back in December, I knew I needed to exit the carousel of imposed wantability. I no longer wanted to be subject to the retailer’s determination of what I should want or to be further manipulated by their sales games. I wanted to be the driver of my wants - if and when I decided I wanted or needed something new, I’d be the one to go out and seek it. So whenever a retailer’s marketing email arrived in my inbox, I’d open it, scroll directly to the bottom of the email, find the small and sometimes notably buried “Unsubscribe” link, and click it! And with each Unsubscribe click, I’d feel as if I’d regained just a smidgen of freedom.
The unsubscribe-a-thon proceed smoothly until I attempted to unsubscribe from Anthropologie. What a clever retailer Anthropologie is and GIRL, do they know their customer! Anthropologie does not have a one-click unsubscribe process. When I clicked “Unsubscribe” on their marketing email, I landed on a page of subscription options, which is not so uncommon. What broke my stride though was their clear message that if I unsubscribed from all marketing emails, I’d also forfeit the birthday discount Anthro offers to its Perks members. 🤯 That’s a 20% discount on a total purchase, y’all! One doesn’t just throw away additional opportunities to save 20% on everything (ahem, as long as it’s full price) at Anthro. So I didn’t. I didn’t complete the unsubscribe process for Anthropologie emails. And two months later, here I am, having gone through a full blown shopping relapse triggered in part by Anthropologie promotions that were delivered directly to my inbox.
Simple, but not easy. That’s the truth of so many healthy habits, whether eating, exercising, sleeping, shopping, or anything else we want to do well. The “what” of healthy habits is simple but the “how” of developing them is often anything but easy.
But today! Today. I will take one simple step to push myself toward a healthier shopping habit. Anthropologie unsubscribe page, I’m coming back for another visit. And this time, I’ll be in charge, thankyouverymuch.