SPENDING HABITS

By REED JOHNSON

Many Americans seek pleasure in shopping-mall excursions

It’s challenging to examine what we value, what we’re moved to buy and how much is enough.

Not long ago, a friend persuaded Angelika Hederer to accompany her on a little shopping spree at Banana Republic. Hederer, who concedes her clotheshorse tendencies but considers herself a choosy, temperate shopper, bought two pairs of pants (one black, one white) and a navy blue V-neck sweater, items that already were well-represented in Hederer’s abundant wardrobe at her Los Angeles home.

Everything she bought was discounted 30 percent, and the bill came to $180, hardly extravagant for a woman of Hederer’s means. (Her husband, now retired, made a comfortable living selling European auto parts). But when she returned home, she felt her purchases nagging with silent reproach.

“I put the bag on the floor and went to my computer, and then I thought, ‘I’ll bring it back,’” she recalled. “I don’t need it. Why the expense now? Why should it hang in my closet?”

She returned the clothes.

Like a number of well-to-do Americans, Hederer lately has been reappraising her fashion spending habits. Her feelings are sometimes conflicted.

On the one hand, Hederer said, some economists are urging those with jobs and incomes to help the economy by firing up their credit cards. On the other hand, she thinks the affluent should show some solidarity with the rest of society by cutting back in tough times.

“Now, with the recession, I can be very good and not buy anything,” said Hederer, a native of Germany. “I spend all my money for Pilates. Because one really has enough.”

But a number of social scientists, behavioral experts and sustainable-living or “voluntary simplicity” advocates say holding to such resolve and self-imposed moratoriums isn’t likely to be simple. It’s an attempt to alter, in a relatively short time, attitudes and routines acquired over years, if not decades. Peer pressure, class expectations and self-perception can make it all the more daunting. And the task is likely to get even tougher once the recession lifts.

The trick for those moved to cut back, some experts say, is to think more deeply about whether that exquisite pair of Louboutins or that pair of $250 jeans truly enhances the quality of life.

But it’s challenging to examine what we value, what we’re moved to buy and how much is enough.

Michael F. Maniates, an associate professor of political and environmental science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., said scholarly research consistently has shown that most Americans think their countrymen overconsume but don’t think they themselves do.

Significantly, Maniates said, Americans’ ideas of what constitutes a high level of consumption have changed radically over time. Since the last decades of the 20th century, instead of just trying to keep up with the neighborhood Joneses, many of us have been trying to match lifestyles with Wall Street hedge-fund managers who summer in the Hamptons or with the images of Hollywood opulence that relentlessly bombard us.

Also, because many Americans work long hours and take fewer vacations than their European counterparts, we may seek more of our pleasures in shopping-mall excursions than in, say, learning to play guitar or taking up tennis.

“To shift our focus from ‘acquire more’ to ‘experience more,’ we need to examine our entire system of work and how we reward it,” Maniates said.

“If this is going to stand a chance of any permanence, it needs to go beyond the individual action” and be built into public policy, he said.

“We really need to think of ways of making it possible for people to think about working less and getting by on less.”

Growing up in Germany when it was still rebuilding from World War II, Hederer had an idea of what it meant to get by on less.

Although her family was prosperous, she was aware of the deprivation around her.

Her husband, also from Germany, “still knows what hunger is, because he was born in ’38,” she said.

“He would laugh now if I said I don’t spend much money on shopping.”

Even though she frequents such stores as Saks, Armani and Zara, and bargain-hunts in Europe during trips to the couple’s second home, in Switzerland, Hederer doesn’t consider herself a hard-core fashionista. She likes to mix high and low labels, doesn’t shop seasonally – “I would hate to spend a fortune for something that is like a fashion for one season, like a pink jacket” – and said she “would hate to go to a restaurant and spend $200 a couple.”

But if her memories of past hard times give Hederer pause about spending money today, she might be atypical.

Tim Kasser, an authority on issues related to consumption and values who teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., said that people raised in uncertain or harsh economic times tend to be more focused, not less, on acquiring material comforts than the offspring of affluent societies.

“If you look at how the ‘Greatest Generation’ ended up acting once they got money, they certainly built a lot of big houses and got gas-guzzling cars and all the rest,” he said.

Kasser pointed to research that supports the idea that money truly can’t buy happiness. Those who focus on material possessions have a higher incidence of smoking, alcohol and drug abuse and depression, while people who are oriented toward intrinsic values tend to be more content. Happiness in Western industrial society has remained relatively stagnant for the past 50 years, he noted, even as prosperity has grown.

Although Kasser says the current economic crisis could spur new ways of living, he doubts long-lasting change will result “unless a new narrative is provided and new economic structures are put into place that make it easy and compelling and desirable for people” to pursue lives in which primary delights don’t come from stuff.

“To be honest, most of the people in my area and who talk about this feel it’s probably not going to happen this time,” he said.

Still, the possibilities are there, said Carol Holst, founder of Los Angeles-based Simple Living America, a program of Cornell University’s Center for Transformative Action. Americans “are can-do people” and might use the current crisis as a catalyst for adopting more voluntary simplicity, she said. But she didn’t put a lot of confidence into that idea.

“People, many of them, seem to be oriented toward getting through this period just so they can get back to things the way they were,” she said.

The alternative? “It’s not about giving up,” Holst said. “It’s about bringing into our lives that which is truly satisfying.”