What You Should Know About 'Stealth Shopping'

Funflation. Slow shopping. Loud budgeting. We live in an age where there’s a quippy term for seemingly every personal finance habit and trend.

While many of these phenomena affect us individually, others have a strong impact on the other people in our lives. An example of this is a rather insidious practice known as “stealth shopping.”

To help stave off its negative effects, we asked a personal finance expert and a clinical psychologist to break down “stealth shopping” and share their advice for keeping it at bay.

What is stealth shopping?

“If you’ve ever bought items secretly and hid the purchase or lied about the cost of a purchase, then you’ve ‘stealth shopped,’ and it’s more common than people might guess,” Molly Burrets, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, told HuffPost.

Basically, stealth shopping is the act of concealing something you’ve bought from your significant other. This is different, of course, from buying gifts as a surprise or just purchasing items on your own and having autonomy over your bank account. Rather, it’s intentional secrecy around bigger or recurrent purchases that affect your household.

“Stealth shopping often happens to avoid conflict about spending habits, or to spend without being judged by your partner,” Burrets explained. “That judgment might be about the amount of money spent, the contents of what is purchased, or the frequency of purchases.”

She noted that some people shop to relieve stress or get a dopamine boost, which can feel gratifying.

“But when this coping strategy is overused, it can become a part of an addictive pattern, where someone hides their shopping due to shame or denial,” Burrets added.

There are other serious