Lee Eisenberg has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career on both the creative and business sides in both the publishing and marketing worlds. As editor-in-chief of Esquire, he led the magazine to numerous national awards in diverse categories such as general excellence, reporting, and design.

In 2006, Eisenberg began work on Shoptimism, published in November, 2009. The quest included a stint as a clerk at Target, numerous encounters with leading academic and marketing experts, a probe into the brave new world of online chatter, repeated forays into stores of every description, where Eisenberg observed the behavior – rational and otherwise – of strangers, friends, and family members, who kept on shopping through economic good times, then bad.