Cash Crunch: Why Extreme Thriftiness Stunts Are the Rage

Do-without projects can entertain, preach and irritate — sometimes all at once. They can attract participants and lose them too. Since September, more than 130 people have joined Seattle clotheshorse Sally Bjornsen on her yearlong quest not to buy a single garment other than underwear. But in March, Bjornsen wrote a post about how two fellow self-deprivers had officially given up and how she wished they would tell her their reasons for doing so. "Why not just cheat and then recommit? Why flat out just call it quits?" one commenter asked. "Was it too hard? Too silly?"

The answer is probably both. It's difficult, particularly for affluent consumers, to stick to their own arbitrary rules. Bjornsen admits she's fallen off the wagon at least once. Arriving at the gym with no workout pants and with a babysitter already paid for at home, she sucked up the guilt and bought a $98 pair of Lululemon pants. (See 10 big recession surprises.)

Sure, she could have skipped the workout, but it's this kind of "What would you have done?" minidrama that keeps readers coming back to these blogs. Adam Greenfield, a documentary filmmaker in San Francisco who managed to get through 2009 without setting foot inside a car, got ribbed by commenters after he revealed that he had a friend pick up stuff he had bought at a lumberyard while he rode his bike home. One scathing commenter wrote that Greenfield's yearlong endeavor "proves nothing except that one individual can Rube Goldberg around getting in a car."

Sometimes self-deprivers adopt rules that turn out to be not only impractical but counterproductive. Rachel Kesel, a conservationist in San Francisco, has blogged since 2006 about living according to the Compact, a group with more than 10,000 members on Yahoo! who promise to buy nothing new other than food and medicine. But Kesel's work involves long days in the woods battling invasive species, and trying to get by in secondhand clothes meant that she was often pulling weeds in pants that had more holes than thread. Now Kesel begrudgingly buys new, highly durable gear, though only when she must, she insists.

Like many bloggers who have embarked on a deprivation experiment, she says trying to adhere to the Compact has made her realize "how mindlessly I'm capable of buying stuff." One month into the experiment, she walked out of a store with a shiny new can opener, only later realizing she'd broken her vow.

By the end of her first year in the Compact, however, when she and her cohort neared a jubilee day, on which they'd celebrate by buying something new, Kesel went into a store, eager to purchase a windbreaker she'd had her eye on. But she was unable to close the deal. "I couldn't get jubilant," she says. "I think my credit-card arm has been broken."

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