Checkout Declined: Shopping Addiction Recovery Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe compulsive shopping and the slow work of stopping. What started it varied: a mother's death, a divorce, the wait through IVF, the quiet after a wedding, sobriety from alcohol, a manic episode, chronic pain that kept one woman on the sofa, and nights alone after long days at a bank. The writers include a warehouse supervisor with 140 pairs of sneakers, a retired dinner lady and the shopping channel, an ICU nurse buying gifts for everyone, a fly-in fly-out worker, a knitter with a yarn stash, a trading card collector, a retired firefighter and a husband living beside his wife's spending, from Columbus and Lagos to Cork, Cebu and Cape Town. They describe live sales, haul videos, fourteen buy-now-pay-later plans, restricted returns, eleven sofas, a basement of bulk buys and a storage unit of car parts. Ways out include Debtors Anonymous, therapy, a no-buy challenge, cash envelopes, a spreadsheet read together, a family doctor who asked the right question and simply learning to sit with the urge. Not every ending is settled: there are court judgments, debts still being repaid, children who picked up the habit, and a writer who has relapsed twice and is still in the middle of it.

Who it's for

For anyone whose spending has stopped feeling like a treat, for partners and grown children who have found a statement they were not meant to see, and for counsellors who support them.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 233 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.