What does it take to quit shopping? Mute, delete and unsubscribe

Ms Cassandra Orakpo had enough.

Too much, in fact. Shopping on her phone had become so easy it had turned into a bad habit. She bought a cake decorating kit, thinking she would make her own birthday cake, and never even took it out of the box.

She has at least 80 bottles of perfume stored in her closet. And despite all the clothes she has purchased, she feels she has nothing to wear.

“Clearly my buying has gotten to a place where it’s bordering on hoarding,” Ms Orakpo said.

So towards the end of 2024, Ms Orakpo, 31, who lives in the city of Houston in the US state of Texas, pledged to tame her buying habits.

The first step was to scrub her accounts: She unsubscribed from daily e-mails from Shein; she changed her TikTok settings to avoid personalised ads; she blocked Temu on the social platform X.

She also opted out of texts from brands like Fashion Nova, her nail salon and even her local bubble tea shop.

And then she told her more than 2,500 followers on TikTok about it.

Ms Orakpo joined a growing group of shoppers who are fed up with a constant barrage of marketing in their social feeds and phone alerts.

Many have taken to TikTok – the site of much of their frustration – to declare that they are participating in “Low Buy 2025” or “No Buy 2025” and sharing the ways they are curbing their spending.

Some “shop their closet”, and others pledge to make sure their containers of blush hit pan before being enticed into buying a new one. The videos have garnered millions of views since the start of 2025.

The zeal that is driving this trend is as much a pushback against the forces of a consumerist culture as it is about saving money, with scorn for corporate manipulation mixed in with tips for changing personal habits.

On the scorn end of the spectrum was a call for an “economic blackout” on Feb 28 by the People’s Union USA, which says it is fighting “an economy designed to exploit workers, suppress wages and keep the majority of us in a constant state of struggle”.

The group asked people not to buy from large corporations – in person or online – for 24 hours.

Avoiding sales pitches from big corporations, however, is harder than ever. As more Americans spend time on social media, brands have flocked there to capture attention and dollars.

In 2025, businesses are expected to spend nearly US$103 billion (S$138 billion) in advertising on social media, a 175 per cent increase since 2021, according to Emarketer, a market research company.

On TikTok, ads for phone stands, wigs and kitchen sink strainers are nearly indistinguishable from content creators opining about reality TV shows and politics.

TikTok Shop, where people can make purchases without leaving the platform, was the single largest driver of US social commerce sales growth in 2024, said Ms Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Emarketer.

Nearly half of TikTok users are expected to make at least one purchase on the platform in 2025, she added.

People are also buying things on Instagram, Facebook Marketplace and YouTube. According to a Bankrate survey released in September 2023, Americans spent US$71 billion on impulse purchases on social media over 2024 – purchases that often ended in feelings of regret.

Ms Orakpo is among the regretful. But now she is determined to resist the wiles of advertisers who invade her phone on social media, email and text.

“It’s a whole ecosystem, and it’s hard to avoid. But it is feeling predatory, it is feeling like manipulation,” Ms Orakpo said. “It is getting heavy.”

Addicted to Buying

For those trying to curb their shopping habits, social media can be a hazardous place.

“The more time you spend on social media, the more inclined you are to engage with your favourite brands but also buy impulsively, make unplanned purchases,” said Associate Professor Angeliki Nikolinakou from the University of Western Macedonia in Greece, who cowrote a 2024 paper on the subject.

For some, social media can aggravate a recognised disorder sometimes called compulsive buying behaviour, which, according to a 2015 meta-analysis of studies from 16 countries, affects roughly 5 per cent of adults.

Modern marketing strategies – having influencers hawk products and promote hauls, and creating urgency through games or short promotion windows (One item left! Selling fast!) – can have a real effect on people who shop compulsively, said Associate Professor Astrid Muller from the Hannover Medical School in Germany, who studies compulsive buying behaviour.

“There may be constant social comparison or even competitive-like exchange in forums about ‘hunting’ for and purchasing particular goods or merchandise products,” Prof Muller said.

Ms Hannah Radke, 33, a home healthcare worker in Nampa, Idaho, said her compulsive shopping habits worsened when she became a mother and started buying things for her daughter.

She found herself scrolling Facebook Marketplace, looking for deals during downtime at work and late at night after her daughter went to bed.

Her social media feed was a cornucopia of irresistible ads and holiday sales pitches. She would be enticed to add items to her cart to meet a retailer’s minimum order value, buying more things – often frivolous – than she had meant to.

“My shopping addiction is about the high that I get when I buy something and have something new or I have a package coming in the mail or I get to open something,” Ms Radke said.

Having bought multiple sets of the same items, she has pajamas, blankets and toys that have never been used.

In 2022, she was sentenced to probation and community service after being caught swopping tags on items in a store. Afterwards, she opened up about her shopping compulsion to her therapist.

Ms Radke now finds comfort at Shopping Addiction Support, a private Facebook group with more than 14,000 members.

Members post about their struggles with compulsive shopping, paying their bills and disappointing their loved ones.

Other communities for people trying to address their compulsive shopping include Shoplifters Anonymous, a 12-step community that is modelled after Alcoholics Anonymous and meets by video-conference every week.

Ms Radke owes about US$15,000 to family members and debt collectors, but she is working two jobs and sticking to her budget.

“I don’t know if I will ever be able to fix my credit score,” she said. “But at least I am not ruining my family relationships over my shopping anymore.”

Some people might consider Mr Amit Jhawar part of the problem: As the chief executive of Attentive, he sends brand messages by way of texts to your phone.

But Mr Jhawar says he is part of the solution. People are overwhelmed. He gets it.

But companies have to get their messages out, and customers do want to know about sales and updates from their favourite brands. He thinks marketing that is more personalised – and easier to opt out of – is better for everybody.

That is where texting comes in. Companies like texts because people open them faster than e-mails, and texts feel more personal and easier to engage with.

And it is easier to opt out of text messages than to unsubscribe from e-mail, so brands have to be more careful about what they send consumers for fear of alienating them, Mr Jhawar said.

Brands often offer customers a discount in return for signing up for the Attentive messages.

“We’re not sending you crappy messages that you have to go and sort through and delete and get all these notifications that aren’t relevant,” said Mr Jhawar, who previously was the Venmo CEO.

A year and a half ago, Attentive, which has more than 8,000 clients, including Crate and Barrel, Hoka and Supergoop, began using artificial intelligence that uses profiles of customers to create personalised messages for them.

Now the company can analyse micromoments of shoppers’ behaviour, Mr Jhawar said, including the time of day they usually browse or whether they zoom in on an image of a product on a retailer’s site.

If they leave the website without purchasing, Attentive can tailor a message to entice the shopper back to the site, like a mobile salesperson trying to close a deal.

“What we’re trying to do is optimise each one of those touchpoints to make it relevant for that consumer,” he said.

Mr Jhawar’s company is one of many in the marketing industry that are approaching customers with tailored messages through texts, ads or e-mails. The industry is expected to become a US$786 billion business by 2026.

But for those who are taking the “No Buy” approach in 2025, the brands’ personalised communication does not necessarily feel welcoming. And texts can feel particularly disruptive.

“You’re already getting e-mails and texts from bills that you have to pay,” Ms Orakpo said. “People would be more receptive if it was once in a while,” she said about that form of marketing. “It gives greedy. It gives capitalism.”

The Resistance

In online communities for shopping addictions and overspending, people trade tips and tricks on how to resist the sophisticated marketing strategies of people like Mr Jhawar.

Ms Lea Toshiye Roache, 34, a content creator in Dallas, pledged with a group of friends to spend less in 2025.

Ms Roache, who described herself as a “slight shopaholic”, has unfollowed brands on social media and unsubscribed to their e-mails and texts.

She created rules that give her some leeway: “self-care” once a month or an “I just simply want it” purchase once a quarter.

“Spending bans are great, and looking at your finances is great,” she said, “but also make it realistic so that you can still be successful.”

Ms Devon Rule is a founder and head of growth at Indyx, an app that helps people create a digital catalog of all the stuff in their closets. The service, which has a paid subscription option, started in 2022 and saw a large number of downloads on Jan 1, which Rule took as a sign of “No Buy” intentions.

“The business model is not selling you new stuff. It’s about helping you use what you have,” said Ms Rule, who is based in San Francisco and previously worked at fashion brands like Gap. “The idea is we’re competing with shopping.”

The financial incentive for the retail industry, or the “machine”, as she called it, is focused on persuading people to buy more items more frequently. And the internet and all of its tools allow shoppers to be “marketed to constantly, all the time”, she said.

“My take is it’s unrealistic to look to brands to moderate us on this,” Ms Rule said. Instead, she said, consumers need ask questions of themselves. Will they really wear the black yoga pants being advertised to them, or will the purchase just sit among the piles in an already bulging drawer?

Ms Orakpo, with the unused cake set, agrees. On TikTok, she has taken to quickly scrolling past influencers’ videos and any content from TikTok Shop.

“I think it just comes down to me being in the practice of scrolling past,” she said. NYTIMES