Shopping Showdown at High Noon

Getty Images The Gilt Groupe, an online sample sale site, has a million members and caused an epic shopping craze—even in a recession. Why are women so obsessed?

“You have to have a strategy,” explains a 30-year-old New York City-based businesswoman. “It’s an incredibly aggressive market. Work from the bottom up and work fast, or you’re dead in the water.”

This is not a conversation about trolling the stock market for bargains; rather, this woman is offering advice on scoring items on Gilt Groupe, a members-only discount-designer-clothing Web site. Featuring heavily discounted wares from coveted designers like Oscar de la Renta, Alexander McQueen, and Vera Wang, Gilt Groupe launches a new sale each day at 12 p.m. What follows next can often be compared to a bloodbath as members try to outscramble each other in filling their carts with shoes, dresses, bags, and other treasure.

“It. Is. Ruining. Me,” writes the D.C.-based journalist in an email. “I was going crazy at first, just buying stuff because the discounts were so great, despite whether I really like it or not.”

“I was covering the finance ministers’ meeting in Horsham, as everyone was trying to figure out how to lift the world out of this economic crisis,” says one D.C.-based journalist in her early 30s. “Suddenly I realized that it was midday on the East Coast. Our London correspondent, an employee from the Treasury department, and I all stopped what we were doing and sat in the press tent, clicking madly, trying to order stuff.”

In this realm of discount Web sites, fashion-minded consumers appear to be as ravenous as ever—crazed, even—as huge price cuts make what were once pipe-dream Vogue editorial—only designer brands accessible to the masses for the first time in years.

Gilt Groupe reports that it has just signed its one-millionth member, creating fierce competition to land that pair of size-38 Christian Louboutin patent leather heels. The clientele has become diverse, ranging from socialites looking for a wear-one-time-only gala dress, to office-assistant underlings looking to jolt their wardrobe with a trophy item, to grandmothers in Florida cat fighting it out over Tory Burch sandals.

The upside: It’s all terribly democratic. Anyone with a fast Internet connection can snare a trendy Doo.Ri and Thakoon (a Michelle Obama favorite!) dress for $300 or $400.

The bad news: Gilt Groupe gets expensive and overwhelming very quickly. Some hardcore members say that they have become calamitously hooked on buying the still-not-cheap bargains, even in the trough of a recession. And these women are not of the limitless-funds, ladies-who-lunch variety, either.

“It. Is. Ruining. Me,” writes the D.C.-based journalist in an email. “I was going crazy at first, just buying stuff because the discounts were so great, despite whether I really like it or not.”

It’s hardly a newsflash that sales of all varieties often lead to dubious choices and false economies. As glamour icon (and marathon shopper) Marlene Dietrich once pointed out, “the temptation of getting things ‘cheaper’ is cluttering up our households with unnecessary objects and actually burdens the budget.”