Economic security

America has a billion-dollar drunk shopping problem

If you’ve ever woken up after a night of drinking with a headache and some alarming bank notifications, you aren’t alone: Nearly half of American adults admit to regularly shopping while drunk — and it appears to be getting worse.

Americans spent an average of $448 per person in drunk purchases in 2017, nearly double what they did in 2016, a new survey of 2,000 adults from shopping comparison site Finder.com found. That would equate to billions of dollars on drunk shopping per year nationwide, the authors said. Men are responsible for more drunk spending than women: $564 versus $282. Generation X spent the most on drunk purchases, averaging $738 last year — more than triple the amount ($206) that millennials spent.

So what are people buying while under the influence? Everything from clothing to gambling, the study found. Some 61% of shoppers say they drunkenly spend on food. The next most common purchases are shoes and clothes (26%) and gambling (25%). Hannah Rimm, a 25-year-old social media manager in New York said she regularly makes $100 hauls on online clothing retailer ASOS only to return the clothes as soon as she sees what she’s bought. “Drunk me has weird taste,” she said.