There is real evidence on both sides of this one, which is unusual. Rick, Pereira and Burson, writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2014, found that making purchase decisions reduces residual sadness. The active part is the choosing rather than the owning. Kang and Johnson had already built a measurement scale for it in the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal in 2011, treating retail therapy as a genuine psychological construct with two separate benefits: cutting negative emotion and reinforcing positive emotion. The counter-evidence is about who does it and how often. Noh and Hasan, in the Journal of Global Fashion Marketing in 2017, found that people who shop specifically to manage negative feelings are more likely to become compulsive buyers and to hoard clothing, an effect strongest in those with high self-esteem or narcissistic traits. A 2001 European Union study put 33% of shoppers surveyed at a high level of addiction to rash or unnecessary consumption, with the debt that implies. So the practice sits on a spectrum running from a cheap mood repair to compulsive buying disorder, and people argue about it because they are standing at different points on that spectrum.