Lead me not into Tempation

I am being led into temptation.
Stalked by the demon of materialism.
Ads are following me.
Specifically, shoe ads.
A comfortable, dowdy pair of Rockports tramps behind every website I visit. "C'mon," it seems to whisper. "You know you want me."
Well of course I do, but I was aiming for fiscal prudence.
That's becoming increasingly difficult as advertisers become more manipulative, consumers become more vulnerable and willpower is becoming as obsolete as typewriter ribbon.
The stalking shoes are a type of marketing called "retargeting," in which online retailers track what you perused online and then pester you with reminders to buy the very items you dismissed. Retailers like Zappos, B & H Photo and the Discovery Channel already use these kinds of ads, the New York Times reports. But with Google and Microsoft entering the field, retargeting has become more pervasive [--] and resisting temptation more challenging than ever.
Retargeting has becomes so invasive that the Federal Trade Commission is considering "Do Not Track" legislation that would allow Internet users the ability to control whether advertisers can track their online behavior and browsing history.

Nothing quite helps in the resistance of temptation like legislative prohibition.

In "We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess," Daniel Akst argues that contemporary society has lost its self-control. The obesity epidemic, the financial crisis, addiction to everything from sex to shopping to the Internet, and a savings rate that, until the financial implosion, was in the negative digits have collaborated to making willpower one of the qualities most envied and least employed.
"A lot of the behavior we call addiction is really a love of pleasure that carries the force of habit," he writes. Reframing our personality failures as "addiction," he argues, absolves us from blame.
We lost self-restraint, he asserts, when the fundamental pillars of society that checked our impulses [--] community, hierarchy, church, family [--] began to crumble.

In their place, as author Barbara Ehrenreich has powerfully argued, is the proliferation of the you-deserve-it Gospel preached by celebrities like Oprah, which insists that acquisition is not only what we need to sooth our perturbed spirits, but what we deserve<$>.
Throw into this toxic stew increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques like shadow ads and you've got a brew from which self-control evaporates completely.
"There is research that shows people still have the same self-control as in decades past, but we are bombarded more and more with temptation," Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management told The New York Times. "Our psychological system is not set up to deal with all the potential immediate gratification."
Odysseus famously had his sailors lash him to a mast to avoid the tantalizing sirens. Think what such inhibition might have done for Brett Favre or Tiger Woods. In principle, Odysseus' realization that he was vulnerable to temptation, is what underlines mechanisms like 401ks and Christmas Clubs --- put the money away before you see it.
This year, downsizing household debt is the top financial goal for consumers, according to a recent online survey from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. It's a laudable goal in a country nearly undone by debt.
But it's going to take a lot of willpower to walk away from a tempting pair of shoes that keep winking at us with such devilish allure.