Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

Binge buying can be just as injurious to your health and family life as binge drinking.

This is a lesson that, it seems, many Britons will learn the hard way over the next few months.

Recession or not, research has revealed that UK shoppers spent more on debit and credit cards from December 19 to December 31 than they did in the same period last year.

People spent an estimated one billion pounds online during the three days immediately after Christmas Eve. Apparently, people were still spending big on Christmas Day.

Over the New Year holidays, many major stores in London and regional centres recorded increases of up to five times their sales compared to the same period last year.

A couple of days back, my wife and I took a trip to one of Britain's leading shopping malls. It's an outdoor, year-round clearance venue for major brands. We went with a very specific goal: to replace a small bag which an airline had thoughtfully lost on a recent flight.

We arrived just before the stores opened, did our shopping quickly and then just wandered around for the exercise, watching other people shop. I was amazed to see, just half an hour after the stores opened, whole swathes of people walking around with armloads of bags stuffed to the brim.

Call me sceptical, but I can't believe that those bags were filled with necessities, or that the prices were just too good to pass up. After all, if an item is at the top of its price range to begin with, knocking it down by thirty or even fifty percent still won't mean you're getting a bargain.

In any case, a bargain is not a bargain if you don't really need it, or if you're relying on credit to cover the purchase.

Just prior to Christmas, economic indicators seemed to suggest that Brits were becoming better savers, squirreling away their hard earned cash in the face of this nation's worst recession in 30 years.

Yet post-Christmas sales reveal that the consumption lifestyle of the past decade still has a powerful grip on many people.

Some shoppers, of course, are buying with a carefully laid out plan, having held off on that much needed purchase until the sales hit. Many more, though, are buying things just because they're on sale.

If we're to steer ourselves and our families through this recession - and, more importantly, avoid similar problems in future - we need to make spending frugally more of a lifestyle choice. We need to become more disciplined about our consumption.

One of the gloomiest recurring news stories of 2009, in most industrialized countries, centred on the burgeoning size of national deficits and borrowing levels. The US owes two trillion dollars, much of it to that rapidly emerging behemoth, China. In the UK, general government debt stood at £796 billion at the end of March 2009.