The study is out and the facts are in. Nearly 80% of a sampling of women surveyed in the UK (as stressed and recessed as anywhere else economically) admitted that they would still “splurge to cheer themselves up.”

According to Karen Pine, a University of Hertfordshire professor and author of “Sheconomics” (and soon-to-be-nominee for Author of Most Dumbass Title of the Year Award), “This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions.”

I don’t know from compensatory consumption and I’m not sure I’m regulating any intense emotions when I cruise Goodwill like a tiger shark in a pool of secondhand chum, but I do like it. I like it because it’s pleasurable. New (to me) stuff is fun, I love knowing how little I paid for it and it triggers my imagination — I wonder how something will look in a room, next to the chiffarobe (What is one? I have to get one!), on a table, or on me with my blue skirt. It’s a creative act, maybe one of very few in an average woman’s modern week. 

Apparently, though, some people haven’t gotten the memo about the state of the economy (although a few more of these folks might turn things around if we let them shop instead of making them answer surveys). Taken too far, an overspend or “splurge” isn’t really pathological as much as it’s maladaptive. Maladaptive, in the way of dogs barking at thunder and fireworks, or birds grooming themselves featherless. It doesn’t make sense, it’s against the perpetrator’s best interests, but it is explainable in terms of natural selection. Defensive barkers were more valued dogs at some point and led lives more conducive to leaving lots of healthy offspring; the same goes for good avian groomers.

It worked the same way on human gals, in 3 easy steps:

1. Women who found bargains and stockpiled them — berries and roots from hidden corners of the forest or savannah, or scavenged skins from carcasses and nice flat stones for grinding grains — they had the fattest, smartest, reproducingest babies.
2. Women who liked doing these proto-shopping behaviors did them more frequently.
3. Women who did the most probably fared the best, i.e., had more babies, fed them better, left bigger genetic trees, of which we’re all twigs.

It’s not roots and berries anymore, it’s frozen chicken pot pies. Or it’s Egyptian cotton sheets and Nine West espadrilles. A while ago it was Beanie Babies, and sometimes it’s Ayn Rand first editions.  Our mothers, their mothers, their mothers, and their mothers survived droughts and famines and raids and escapes across Switzerland with the Von Trapp Family Singers because they had or could find enough stuff.

How do you escape a million years of evolutionary peer pressure?  Ruby wants your stories about fighting your basic instinct to feather your nest. Send them to me here.

Advice for the Rest of Us appears here every Friday (one could almost say obsessive-compulsively).

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