Annie Leonard was on The Colbert Report last night.  She made the Internet phenomenon video The Story of Stuff and has just released a book on the same subject.  She basically discusses the same idea of overconsumption and buying stuff we don't need. The interview and video are both worth watching.

I think this problem isn't just limited to the extremely wealthy.  I know of a lot of people who make an average or below average income who are constantly buying things they don't need or use.  I think that sort of spending just doesn't rub us the wrong way because it's on a much smaller scale.  They're buying knick-knacks and gadgets off the TV instead of multi-million dollar homes, cars, and other amenities.  In our minds, someone with all the money in the world shouldn't need to buy useless items to be happy, while the spending habits of someone working 9-5 with little vacation time can be easilly forgiven as retail therapy.  I also think we all imagine that if we were millionaires, we would handle our money differently, but I think it's hard to tell what we would really do in that situation.  I think a lot of it depends on how you come about your wealth and what type of celebrity image you are expected to maintain.  Grace Groner wasn't a national celebrity attending red carpet events or being constently watched by the media, so I doubt she felt any pressure to conform into the celebrity culture that promotes excessive spending like that.
 
I'm not trying to defend these spending habits, and if everyone who was wealthy only bought just enough and gave the rest away, we could probably solve a lot of global issues with that money.  But I also feel the same frustration about this kind of spending when I see statistics about things like the number of dollars Americans spend on sun glasses or potato chips every year.  It's hard to tell anyone how they should or shouldn't spend their money without opening up a can of worms and questioning the seemingly harmless purchases us regular working stiffs make.

I agree that it's more worthwhile to use money to help others than waste it excessively on materialistic things you won't even use. But maybe they would rather spend it on materialistic things than on charity, because they are greedy for the concept of having money. What I mean is, if you spend the money on charity, that money is gone, right? But because many people can't bear to see their money go, they try to keep the money to themselves, often in the form of luxury goods. They might not use what they buy, but just the fact that they have those expensive things in their possession gives them a sense of security that they still have their money. So, those objects just end up being a symbol of their wealth. This is a rather depressing speculation, but I've been thinking about how people seem so obsessed with having "more" than others.