Business

Shopping addiction should be taken more seriously say sufferers

Published

2 months ago

July 30, 2025

BBC A woman with short blonde hair standing in front of rails of jackets and a mannequin — Lucy says her experiences of shopping addiction are like a “physical and an emotional drowning”

A day of retail therapy can be just the ticket for some people to help them feel better about themselves. But what happens when you can’t stop shopping?

Surrounded by racks of shirts, dresses and jumpers, Lucy tells me that she could spend up to 14 hours a day searching out new clothes as an escape from reality.

The 37-year-old’s life may sound like a dream, but Lucy is clear that excessive shopping damaged her life.

At one point, Lucy found herself not paying her bills so she could continue to buy clothes.

“It’s like a physical and an emotional drowning. I have felt like I’m just under a weight of clothes constantly,” she says.

Lucy has no idea how many garments she owns, but they take up an entire room in her West Yorkshire home as well as several suitcases – and a 35 sq ft storage unit.

“Clothes acted like an armour to not feel the feelings that I did in real life,” she explains.

Lucy set up a fashion Instagram account and her shopping eventually “spiralled” to the point that she was spending £700 per week – eventually racking up £12,000 of debt.

“It was the first thing I would think about when I woke up.

“You keep looking for clothes in the same way someone might keep drinking because they haven’t quite reached the point of escapism they were hoping to reach,” she recalls as she continues to recover.

‘Penny drop moment’

She says seeing influencers online with copious amount of clothes “normalised” her habits.

It was not until a therapist told her she may have oniomania – the compulsive urge to buy things – that she realised it was possible to be addicted to shopping.

She describes the second in her NHS Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) session that she heard about the disorder as a “penny drop” moment.

Shopping addiction, also known as compulsive buying disorder or oniomania, is when a person feels an uncontrollable need to shop and spend, despite the negative consequences.

It is not known how many people have it. A review of research suggests it affects around 5% of adults but a more recent study says it may have risen to 10% since the pandemic.

Now Lucy and others across the UK are calling for a better understanding of the condition and for more support from the NHS.

“I think the resources are currently lacking. The research and understanding of oniomania is just not there in the same way as addiction to substances,” Lucy says.

A woman with long dark brown hair wearing a cow print jacket standing in front of a display of perfumes — Natalie has around 400 bottles of perfume which she bought in around two years

Natalie has what she calls her “cupboard of doom” with more than 10,000 household items in her Rotherham home.

For the 40-year-old, her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) “triggers” her to buy certain things – including a particular number of items and colours.

The cupboard is home to 300 tubes of toothpaste and 3,000 washing pods.

“It just escalated to the point where I was going out and just wasn’t settled until my boot was full of stuff,” Natalie says.

At the peak of her addiction, she would be at the shops every day and could spend up to £3,000 a month – including £1,000 on toiletries.

“I cannot stop – and I do not want to stop either. If I see something online, I need it. I don’t care how I get it, I need to get it.”

The mother-of-one recently spent £1,000 while on a flight – mainly on perfumes – and says she has about 400 fragrances, bought in little more than two years.

Natalie, who works in private nursing, says ads have a “massive effect” on her buying habits and she can spend around six hours a day watching perfume videos online when she is not working.

She has undergone therapy both within the NHS and privately, but feels it was not successful as she is not yet ready to stop – but is focused on trying to cut her shopping.

“I think every addiction should be treated the same and more help and therapy should be available [from the NHS] to people who want it,” she adds.

HANDOUT A young woman with long blonde hair wearing a pink shirt taking a selfie with beauty accessories in the background — Zuzanna, 18, told the BBC she can spend her wage within a week of being paid – mainly on beauty products

The BBC has spoken to 15 people who feel they have a shopping addiction.

Many talked of a mental toll and feelings of guilt and shame. One said they developed an eating disorder as a result, and another said it became a “monster” in their life.

All felt that social media contributed to their addiction.

According to experts, the proportion of retail sales online has more than doubled in the last decade, up from 12% in May 2015 to 27% in May 2025.

Digital advertising body IAB UK says advertisers’ spend on social media content grew by 20% last year – standing at a total of £8.87bn.

Zaheen Ahmed, director of therapy at The UKAT Group, which runs addiction treatment centres across the country, says they have seen more people with a shopping addiction.

He explains that the hormonal anticipation of a purchase could be equated to the reaction of a drug user securing a hit.

Mr Ahmed says that social media use as part of smartphone ownership is “the new normal”.

“Social media is impacting our lives big time and it is contributing to our urge to buy, urge to spend, urge to interact every time.”

HANDOUT A young woman with light brown hair wearing a white vest holding five Stanley cups — Alyce saw Stanley cups trending – which ended up with her buying five

Shopping became a coping mechanism for issues surrounding Alyce’s self-confidence and esteem.

She started using Buy Now Pay Later schemes when she was aged 18 – a decision she describes as a “gateway” to other credit.

In the end, Alyce, from Bristol, was saddled with debts of £9,000 after spending up to £800 each month on new items, particularly ordering clothes online.

“The more I had to open, the more excitement there was.

“But once I opened the parcels, the buzz would wear off and I’d be sad again – so then the cycle continues.

“Social media is essentially another version of QVC, but one younger generations can watch,” the 25-year-old says.

Alyce, who works in business administration, has since overcome her addiction with therapy and is now almost debt free.

“If I hadn’t done that, I don’t really know where I would be,” she says.

“It does genuinely change your way of thinking and creeps into everything you do – your whole life revolves around payday when you can shop again.

“It just becomes so overwhelming.”

If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story you can visit the BBC Action Line for more support.

The NHS says it is possible to become addicted to just about anything – but there’s no distinct diagnosis for a shopping addiction.

One reason is because experts dispute how to classify it, with some believing it is a behavioural addiction, while others link it to mood or obsessive compulsive disorders.

Professor of addiction at the University of York Ian Hamilton says shopping addiction has “caught psychiatry on the back foot”.

The expert, who has worked in the field for three decades, said he believes we are still two or three years from the disorder being more widely recognised as a formal diagnosis.

Prof Hamilton says the retail sector has lifted some of the strategies used by the gambling industry to keep people engaged online.

“I don’t think it’s any accident that people find it difficult once they start this loop of spending, buying, feeling good then having remorse.”

The academic adds the rise of influencers is not just a coincidence.

“It’s one thing having an item described to you, [but that] doesn’t have the same impact as seeing a glossy well-put together video package which extols the virtue of an item and only shows the positives.”

Pamela Roberts, psychotherapist at the healthcare provider Priory Group, is clear: “We need to learn different coping strategies but we can only learn [them] when it’s recognised as a problem – and that’s only done when it’s made official,” she adds.

An NHS spokesperson said: “NHS Talking Therapies provides treatment for a range of conditions including OCD and provides practical skills and techniques to help cope.”

They added that anyone struggling with obsessive and compulsive behaviour can contact their GP or refer themselves for therapy.

Source link

Business

Amazon Bolsters AI Agent Push With 2 Executive Hires: Internal Memos

Published

41 minutes ago

September 15, 2025

Leena Rao

Amazon is doubling down on its agentic AI ambitions, hiring two senior executives to help build its growing portfolio of developer tools and infrastructure for intelligent agents.

The new hires follow Business Insider’s report in early September that Amazon was getting ready to make a big splash in the AI agent market, sparking a rally in the company’s shares. Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, has made an aggressive move to position itself as a leader in agentic AI, where intelligent software agents build, deploy, and manage complex applications on behalf of users.

David Richardson returns to Amazon Web Services as vice president of AgentCore, the company’s foundational agent infrastructure offering. A 16-year veteran of the cloud giant, Richardson was instrumental in launching AWS’s Serverless business before departing in 2022 to lead developer experience and product platform at Stripe.

Now back, DRR, as he’s known inside Amazon, will oversee AgentCore along with related projects such as the Strands SDK and Agent Builder within Bedrock, AWS’s popular AI platform.

“We expect DRR to start other new exciting efforts in the AgentCore umbrella,” Swami Sivasubramanian, who runs the Agentic AI team at AWS, wrote in a recent internal memo announcing the hire.

Amazon declined to comment.

Joe Hellerstein, a professor at UC Berkeley and renowned database researcher, has also joined AWS as Vice President and Distinguished Scientist, according to a separate internal memo. He will play a pivotal role in advancing Kiro, AWS’s agentic integrated development environment (IDE). Kiro has quickly gained traction, attracting over 100,000 users in its first week of release.

Hellerstein’s academic work includes leadership of the Hydro project, a framework for building distributed systems. At AWS, he will focus on integrating Hydro’s principles into Kiro to strengthen the platform’s reliability and developer appeal.

“Joe will work closely with our customers to understand their needs and translate that feedback into making both Hydro and our products more impactful,” Deepak Singh, an AWS VP who oversees developer agents and experiences, wrote in an internal memo. “We are particularly excited about the possibilities of how Hydro can integrate with Kiro to help our customers build robust, high-performance distributed systems.”

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

Source link

Business

Fueled by AI Hype, Google Becomes Fourth Company to Pass $3 Trillion Market Cap

Published

2 hours ago

September 15, 2025

Ece Yildirim

On Monday, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, became the fourth company to reach a market value of $3 trillion, and every member of this exclusive club has something in common.

All it took was a rather small 4% rise in shares for the tech giant to hit the coveted stock market benchmark. Rather unsurprisingly, the three previous winners of that title—Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple—are all titans of the tech industry that have been riding the wave of investor interest in AI, as well.

Alphabet stock had a great start to September after a federal judge concluded earlier this month that the tech giant could keep Chrome despite its monopoly in internet search. The judge’s reasoning for that was that generative AI would eventually pose “a meaningful challenge to Google’s market dominance.”

Google is trying to get ahead of that “meaningful challenge” by fusing AI into its search engine and pouring billions into developing its AI offerings, including its own AI chatbot Gemini.

It seems that investment cashed out for the company. As of Monday morning, Google Gemini is now the number one free app on Apple’s App Store, relegating OpenAI’s ChatGPT to number two status and giving the much-needed push to the company’s stock.

The AI hype is inextricably and intricately linked to the significant stock market returns that these tech giants, and many others, have experienced this year. The trillion-dollar question: Is there an AI bubble?

AI hype driving major gains

The best example of AI hype delivering trillions of dollars of financial gain is perhaps Nvidia, the ultimate AI darling of the stock market. Due to its immense market share in AI chips and the meteoric rise it experienced thanks to the technology, the company is largely considered the face of the AI hype.

Earlier this summer, Nvidia made history as the first company to ever hit $4 trillion market valuation.

Apple, considered the least AI-savvy of the four companies to breach the $3 trillion benchmark, was the first company to ever be worth $3 trillion but is still yet to hit $4 trillion. Meanwhile, both Nvidia and Microsoft have outperformed Apple and already reached that milestone. Microsoft’s breach of the $4 trillion benchmark was also thanks to AI.

Late July, Microsoft posted an earnings report that showed stellar revenue for its cloud computing platform Azure. The stock move following the report pushed Microsoft briefly above $4 trillion market value.

Fellow cloud infrastructure provider Oracle also benefited greatly from an AI-demand-driven stock move. Chairman Larry Ellison became the richest man on Earth last week after Oracle stock skyrocketed more than 42% on news that the company expects to collect half a trillion dollars (and potentially billions of dollars more) in the coming quarter on AI deals alone.

Is there a bubble?

All this is great news for tech companies and their financial metrics, but is it substantiated? That question has been plaguing investors for some time now.

According to some experts (and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), there is indeed an AI bubble.

“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said last month in a dinner with journalists, according to The Verge. “My opinion is yes.”

An AI report from MIT fueled those worries further just a few weeks ago. The researchers shared that despite the push to scale AI in the corporate world, fewer than one in ten AI pilot programs have actually generated revenue gains.

AI is currently deployed mostly by larger firms in select fields. But even there, AI adoption is now declining, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau findings.

If AI is indeed in a bubble, the burst could be catastrophic. So much is riding on the AI wave right now, including the entire U.S. economy.

In a paper published in July, Fed researchers said that if AI demand does not scale proportionally with investment, it can lead to “disastrous consequences,” and compared it to the railroad over-expansion of the 1800s and the economic depression that followed. Also in July, economist Torsten Slok called the AI bubble of today even worse than the 1999 Dot-com bubble.

Source link

Business

Why Walmart Is Emerging As an AI Powerhouse

Published

2 hours ago

September 15, 2025

Ashley Rodriguez

Analysts have characterized the recent strength in the stock market as an AI rally, but flying under the Magnificent Seven’s radar is Walmart — a company so vast that it literally has its own weatherman.

And as it turns out, the retail juggernaut’s scale and reach are proving to be tremendous assets in the AI race.

That’s because most top AI companies — like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, or Meta — operate in a primarily virtual space, processing unfathomably complex rivers of information into more digital information. AI-adjacent companies like Nvidia, Intel, and Oracle focus on providing the physical infrastructure upon which the AI machines function. Then there are the companies that are using digital intelligence to deliver physical results through automation and augmented experiences, like Tesla and Amazon.

Walmart, by contrast, has a vast and complicated set of physical challenges to solve as the largest retailer in the US — and the world. Those include everything from cleaning up spills in the dairy aisle to stocking shelves.

“We move billions of items around every month, every year,” Walmart US CEO John Furner said Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. He said the company has been developing machine learning tools and other automation projects since around 2015.

Furner said that the company’s AI models and supply chain automation help plan inventory to arrive at the right aisle at the right time, for example. One technique involves creating “digital twins” of each facility to model the movement of merchandise through the system on its way to customers.

Furner also said store associates increasingly have an AI chatbot handy via their handheld devices to help them better set priorities and help customers.

“It’s a combination of people being powered by technology. There’s a lot of judgment to retail and decision-making. And we’re in a very dynamic industry,” he said. “We think this next phase of physical AI in combination with Gen AI is going to be really helpful.”

The company’s head of e-commerce, David Guggina, told the Goldman Sachs Communicopia and Tech conference last week how AI is helping his team run experiments and fulfill orders at an increasingly rapid rate.

Guggina said his team is now able to work at breathtaking speed behind the scenes, too.

“What took a data scientist days or weeks before can now be done in minutes,” he said.

AI also helps ensure that each of the company’s 4,700 stores has the kinds of products best suited to their local markets, slashing delivery times to minutes after a customer places an order.

“We’ve just completed the third inning,” he said by way of the classic baseball game analogy. “So we’re still early with regard to our automation journey in the fulfillment network.”

These digital-to-physical uses of AI are also complemented by a myriad of “micro agents” that handle tasks like tracking local event calendars or monitoring inventory levels.

Walmart, of course, is still fine-tuning its AI approach, and there have been hiccups.

The proliferation of bespoke Walmart-made AI agents eventually started to confuse users, the company told the Wall Street Journal.

The company has rolled many of those micro agents into four “super agents” designed to assist shoppers, merchandisers, programmers, and third-party marketplace sellers.

Still, because Walmart’s 20,000-strong global tech team builds so many of these digital and physical solutions in-house, the company is emerging as an unexpected AI powerhouse.

The company snagged former Instacart exec Daniel Danker in July to accelerate its AI efforts.

It’s also deepening its partnership this month with OpenAI via a new training program for associates and enterprise access to ChatGPT tools for frontline Sam’s Club employees to help operate their warehouse stores more smoothly.

After all, while chatbots might sometimes hallucinate answers, there’s no faking a cold gallon of milk on your doorstep.

Source link