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Online designer discount sales have replaced my eBay addiction. I now spend my nights trolling Web sites such as the two-week-old TheOutnet.com looking for marked-down Chloé and Alexander McQueen. The scenario: The spring/summer collection markdowns are happening even earlier this year due to a surplus of inventory thanks to the horrible retail climate. At major department stores worldwide, shoppers can find designer goods that once seemed several paychecks out of reach on sale for as much as 50% or 75% off.

But the discount game is even more manic on the Internet thanks to a group of new sites that have women scouring the Internet for marked down Christian Louboutin and Chloé. Sadly, I have become one such girl. (But mom don’t worry. I’m not buying all of this stuff. Those Suze Orman books you gave me have not gone to waste.) On TheOutnet, I found a Maison Martin Margiela tuxedo trench coat no sale for 60% off and a Stella McCartney satin dressed marked down 70%. Fortunately for me, when I tried to join the somewhat new online sample sale site Gilt Groupe, I received a welcome email letting me know that I had been added to the wait list rather than giving me a username and password. But this gives you an idea of how large the phenomenon has become. It’s sparking a new compulsive kind of recession shopping in which the price tag becomes more seductive than the garment itself. Imagine the drama that happens as women run to snatch shoes at a Manolo Blahnik sample sale, simply because they’re priced so low. I never wore half of the stuff I bought at those events. And so my new addiction will go no further than my hunting down the bargains and then letting someone else snatch it up, like a fisherman who catches a big one, admires it, and then drops it back into the sea to swim away.