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How Stores Make Us Spend More Than We Originally Plan To
July 3, 2007Love Your Health Money Family & Relationship
We all do that - we all fall prey to sale tactics used by retail stores like WalMart and Target at one time or another. Their sale tatics are so good; first they get us to come to their store with infomercials and once you are in there, we can’t resist buying stuff “on sale” that we didn’t go there to buy for. Then when we get home, we realize that we have spend more money than what we originally planned. This article will probably prevent such things happening to you again in the future. Here are the top 5 methods I have gathered that retail stores utilize to make us buy more items from them:-
1. Infomercials. They send out lots of infomercials to us through ads in TV, radio, magazines or newspapers. Infomercials use a number of crafty tricks to deceive us. The first of these tricks is the infomercial’s format- a look and feel of a content the infomercial was put in. Because of their deceiving format, we pay a good attention to that ad like we are giving to the rest of the content. But the infomercials doesn’t just stop here, they give us a sense of urgency to visit them - remember “memorial sales this weekend only” kind of infomercials?
2. Bigger Carts. According to Ralph Nader, bigger carts were designed to shame consumers into bigger purchases. Bigger carts make us buy more items - because it is easier to throw items into the bigger carts. It makes us think “i gotto get more items because the cart looks empty.” Only if we can realize that it is not the number of items, it is the size of the cart that is making us feel that way. Slate.com has a good article about the shopping carts size getting bigger.
3. Coupons. Everytime I go to grocery store, I like to take a look at the coupon booklet they put by the entrance. Often times, it has coupons that has “Save 50% on This Item.” Because of such coupons I sometimes end up buying items that I don’t use much. That money I could have used on an item that I really need even though there are no coupons for that item. If I buy that unnecessary item with Save 50% coupon, eventually I have to go back to the store and get the item I really needed.
4. Easy to Grab Items at the Checkout. Every store seems to do it. They put Gift cards, celebrity magazines, candies, beverages etc right by the checkout, just before we are ready to stop anymore spending in that store. Since these items are like a dollar, it try to reasons with us that a dollar more spent won’t really hurt us much. But if we really look at it this way, we might end up buying more than just one item from there since “it is just a dollar.”
5. Deals. This one is little bit similar to Coupons, but this one doesn’t need coupons. We go to the store and see items saying “Buy Two, Get the Third One For Half Price.” This might be a good deal for a bigger family, but a single guy like me doesn’t need that many items of the same kind. Eventually the half of them gets old and rotten, and end up in the trash. Now that’s a bad deal.
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