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• Mr. Eisenberg's official site
• Excerpts from Shoptimism
• "Why Shopping Is Good Again"

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Shoptimism author defends the spending habits of American consumers. (2:01)
 

Full Interview (12:55)
 

Tavis: We continue our "Road to Wealth" series tonight with Lee Eisenberg, former editor-in-chief at "Esquire," who has gone on to become an influential best-selling author. His previous books include "The Number," which explored the financial challenges facing Americans approaching retirement.

His latest, in stores this week, is called "Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What." He joins us from New York. Lee, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Lee Eisenberg: Good to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: I was just laughing today - not ha-ha laughing, but laughing about the irony of the retail numbers out today that show that in the month of October, at least, we're still buying. We're in a recession, but retail numbers are up. What do you make of that?

Eisenberg: Well, I guess we're all getting shoptimistic. I'm really not that surprised, because this morning I was out at one of these gargantuan shopping malls, actually, in New Jersey, and I noticed several things.

First of all, the place was pretty crowded and it's the middle of the week. Secondly, I saw very few sale signs, which we're not accustomed to seeing, and there were no Christmas decorations yet. There were almost none, and usually in a bad year those start going up in the middle of August.

So I do think things are beginning to feel a little bit more stable now, even though this season there are seven million more unemployed people in the United States than there were a year ago.

Tavis: I love the word; define it for me - shoptimism.

Eisenberg: Well, it means several things and I think the subtitle pretty much got at it, which is to say that there is something that will compel us to shop no matter what. I don't think that necessarily means we're going to shop the same way with the same recklessness or the same mind-set, but we will continue to find ways to shop. Where there's a will to shop, there's a way to shop. The other thing - let me just add one other point.

Tavis: Sure.

Eisenberg: Shopping and buying can be very anxious. It's both pleasurable on the one hand and painful and nervous-making on the other hand, and I think oftentimes we lose sight of the fact that while I'm not condoning reckless spending or people getting themselves way into debt, I think there are some material things, material buys that even if we buy them emotionally and not rationally they do add something meaningful to our lives. In the book, I try to explore exactly what that is.

Tavis: Some examples of that, since we're on it?

Eisenberg: Well, a really moving and memorable one, I interviewed a woman in Minnesota whose father had recently died, and she and her brother went back to his house to clean out his stuff. She took some of these things back to her house and they kind of found a place, some of them found a place, some of them didn't.

But she stopped and she said, "The one thing that I would have liked to have had from him was his iPod," and I was surprised to hear that and I said, "Why?" She said, "Because on that iPod," which was lost shortly after he had died, she said, "All of the music that he was listening to in the years prior to his death, all the music that he loved, was on that iPod," and it would have been a very, very meaningful thing for her to have kept over the years.

Now that's - the iPod is just an everyday electronic gadget. It's advertised on TV, it's on bus shelters and so on and so forth, but yet it represented something of her father that was very profound to her, and all of us have an experience, we have our dad's watch or a shirt or something like that.

So I think while it's easy to deride material objects as unnecessary, I do think that part of us does get invested in the things we buy, even the material things.

Tavis: Let me back down for just a second. Why do we shop, Lee?

Eisenberg: Well, there are plenty of reasons for that. Obviously - and that gets into the question of do we need or do we want? Obviously there are things we shop for that we need, things to subsist. We need water and food and shelter and clothing and healthcare and the rest.

But most of the things we buy, we don't, strictly speaking, need in order to survive, but we need them for a whole variety of emotional reasons. Sometimes we buy things just to make ourselves feel better, and there are critics of consumption, anti-consumerists, who will tell you that we shouldn't do that, we shouldn't buy anything, really, that we don't need.

But I don't think that's particularly fair. I think if we can buy things, even impulsively, and occasionally even recklessly, if we can do that without breaking the family budget I really don't see any reason that that's a bad thing.

Blue Saturday - you've had a tough week at work, you want to go out and you want to buy something new or buy - a new hairdo or something like that. If we're not doing some serious harm to our needs, our real needs, then I don't see any crime in that.

Tavis: But isn't it true, though, that so many Americans buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have?

Eisenberg: Absolutely true, and to a large degree we got ourselves into this financial mess because of that, and a great many people are laboring under these enormous revolving credit bills and mortgages they can't afford, and all the rest.

I'm not suggesting that isn't the case, but I do think that to some degree we have painted the society and painted the culture with too broad a brush. I interviewed hundreds of people about why they bought and why they shopped, and I have to tell you a great many people, and I would daresay most of us, are pretty reasonable, even though we may indulge now and then, and I think that gets a little lost in this sort of blanket indictment that our eyes are bigger than our wallets.

Tavis: And yet Madison Avenue is in part, I would argue, at least responsible for just putting this stuff, as it were, in our face all the time. What I'm getting at here is whether or not we're shopping - you raise in the book this question of need versus want. I want to add another one - is it need, is it want, or is it the fact that we're being programmed to do it?

Eisenberg: Well, this fear that we are being programmed really now goes back at least 50 years. Back in the '50s there was a classic best seller called "The Hidden Persuaders," it was written by Vance Packard. In the book I go back about 50 years and talk about how the modern buy side and sell side really came to be, and it's a pretty interesting social history, I think, of the United States.

You can look at advertising in two ways. You can look at it as you've just suggested, which is it's an evil force that Madison Avenue mad men have the ability to sort of inject us with some sort of buy virus and then we go out and we buy fairly mindlessly.

On the other hand, I think you could argue that we are so used to it - there's way too much advertising. The world is far too papered over with advertising. It's way too much clutter; it's too much noise, and all the rest. I'm not suggesting it isn't.

But I also think in many ways, Madison Avenue has done itself in because there is so much advertising, because we've all grown up with it. I think you could also argue that it's sort of the air we breathe. It doesn't really make a dent anymore. We're so used to these ridiculously indefensible product placements in movies that are just so blatantly obvious, we're so used to opening a magazine and we're seeing an ad on one page and then we're seeing, quote, unquote, "editorial" for that same product on the facing page, I give a lot of us a lot more credit in terms of understanding that it is permeable.

I'm not suggesting there isn't too much of it, but I am suggesting that most of us have the brains to see through it and we may not be as programmable, perhaps, as some critics of advertising often argue.

Tavis: Is that to suggest that if Madison Avenue pulled back there might be a gain?

Eisenberg: Well, I think Madison Avenue, frankly, is pulling back in a way. I don't think they want to pull back but with the coming of the Internet and particularly social media - we hear all this buzz about social media - the fact of the matter is that the balance of power, I think, has shifted to a large degree away from the marketers and onto the consumer.

I don't know about you, Tavis, but before I purchase virtually anything now - it could be a pack of AAA batteries or it could be an expensive flat-screen television or whatever it might be - I don't make a consumer move without going online and checking prices.

We can buy a car now and we know exactly, right down to the penny, what the car dealer is paying for the car, and that enables us, empowers us, to negotiate better. Then finally, and this is borne out study after study, 80 percent, 90 percent of us will say that we would much sooner trust what other people like us or other people in the market for something or have bought something, we what they say about the quality and the fairness of a price than we do the advertisers.

I think advertisers, mainstream advertisers, are very much running scared now because there is so much, if you will, crowd wisdom, popular wisdom, voting by consumers on service, on quality, on price and everything else. So I think we're in the midst of a pretty dramatic revolution in terms of how we make our decisions.

Tavis: Give me a global perspective on this, Lee. Your subtitle suggests that the American consumer will keep on buying, no matter what. Are we the only ones like that in the world or are other people just like us?

Eisenberg: Well, we actually may be - and this is not a great thing - we may be - we're still buying a lot because this is an enormous consumer-driven country and will be foreseeably, but if you talk to the marketers of everything from cosmetics to designer clothing to all the rest, they don't really see their growth happening here.

Now, that may not be very good news for us. Where they are looking to are the so-called brick nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China, places where the money is, quote, unquote, "new" or "young," where there are rising middle classes and beyond who are just getting their first taste of Louis Vuitton or L'Oreal or any of these other brands that have been driven to success here in the United States.

I'm not suggesting we're on a path toward downward mobility, though I do think we're certainly on a path to a certain kind of plateauing, and when you take that and combine that with demographics, which is the aging of the baby boom and some other important demographic trends, this may not be the cradle of the buy that it always has been.

Of course you can applaud that and say okay, we're coming to our senses and we're not going to be so materialistic, but it also may suggest that our expectations are beginning to level off a little bit.

Tavis: Finally, I got a kick out of the fact, given that we're both men in this conversation, that (laughter) - I got a kick out of the fact that women, you argue in the book, are much more willing to cop to being a shopaholic. Men don't like to admit that, but you argue that we're just as bad. We don't call ourselves shopaholics, we call ourselves collectors.

Eisenberg: Right, right. I interviewed a psychiatrist whose specialty is compulsive buying, and I'm not - a lot of us say we're shopaholics or our wife is or our husband is, and we're really not, not by the classic definition of the term.

But he had just completed the largest study ever in the United States on compulsive buying, and surprisingly, about as many men on a percentage basis can be considered certifiable compulsive buyers as women. He told me of one case of a patient of his who had I don't know, 100 or 150 digital cameras, and he said, "The man never took a single photo."

(Laughter) His defense is that, "I don't buy out of control, I'm a collector." I think to a very large degree, that's true. Men hide behind hobbies and then they'll go out and they'll buy all kinds of redundant items in order to complete their collection.

Tavis: Well, I collect books and I'm glad to have this one added to my collection.

Eisenberg: That's a - thank you very much. That's a good compulsion to have.

Tavis: Yeah. It's called "Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What." It is written by "New York Times" best-selling author of "The Number," Lee Eisenberg. Lee, nice to have you on. Thanks for the text.

Eisenberg: Tavis, thank you.