retail therapy
retail therapy noun: shopping that is done purely for pleasure, especially as a distraction from personal difficulties or disappointments.
Noun
retail therapy (uncountable)
- Shopping that is done purely for pleasure, especially as a distraction from personal difficulties or disappointments.
- This vicious cycle, "the loneliness loop," has been studied by economists for more than a decade. But surely, if retail therapy can be medicine, there must be a way for shopping to make us feel less lonely, right?2013 August 7, Derek Thompson, “The Loneliness Loop: Why Feeling Sad Makes Us Shop and Shopping Makes Us Sad”, in The Atlantic
Questions about retail therapy
- What does retail therapy mean?
- Retail therapy means shopping that is done purely for pleasure, especially as a distraction from personal difficulties or disappointments.
- What part of speech is retail therapy?
- Retail therapy is a noun.
Words near retail therapy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: retail therapy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-retail therapy.wav.
Cite this entry: “retail therapy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/retail_therapy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.