Let’s start with the undeniable: “You are the target.” You are the subject of massive amounts of research. You cannot begin to imagine the money spent to woo you. Entire industries exist to define, stimulate and trigger your cravings. And, whether you are aware of it or not, people are actually quite good at getting you to do exactly what they want you to do, especially when you shop.
How do marketers get you to pull the trigger? They set prices with fewer syllables that end in “9” because that makes you more likely to purchase. They overprice merchandise in the beginning with the intention of marking the price down later (known as “anchoring”), because they completely understand you are a sucker for a good deal. They even carefully monitor how friendly the sales clerk is to you — because the research shows that sometimes “snooty” upsells.
In her article, “Why You Bought that Ugly Sweater,” Eleanor Smith outlines the contours of “retail atmospherics.” She points to a sculpting of every retail environment so thorough-going that it is creepy. Faced with increasingly competitive online platforms for impulsive consumers, physical stores have amped up the atmospherics to have you buy now. Besides training a sales force in how to interact with you, stores will increasingly play on your five senses:
• Smell: specific scents evoke emotional states conducive to purchasing.
• Sight: cool, blue-toned interiors lead to more spending, whereas you won’t find orange, which makes you more likely to balk at prices.
• Sound: expect popular music if they want you to impulse buy, or lesser-known background music if they want you to focus on how much you’ll save with their promotion. If they get the right genre of music, your pleasure in it will cause you to lose track of time and you will tend to spend more.
• Touch: you’ll buy pricy items if you can handle them, so look for fewer locked glass cabinets (except to deter shoplifting).
• Taste: ever seen the food carts at Costco?
Even the layout of dressing rooms, the number of options you have for a particular item, and whether an item is on the middle or end of a shelf — all of these things are part of the atmospherics aimed to see you give in to your cravings. Expect the trends of in-person shopping only to become more refined and pervasive.
In her book, Glittering Vices, philosopher Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung identifies this trend as “avarice.”Avarice can “wear many faces — an overflowing shopping cart or a single purchase … a closet jammed with ‘great deals.’ The classic virtue opposite avarice is liberality, which is linguistically connected with ‘liberty.’ It is “freedom from attachment to money and whatever money can buy.”
Is America the “land of the free?” Our consumer habits suggest we are actually enslaved — internally by avarice and externally by shopping atmospherics. Our culture may not want, but truly needs, examples of people who are immune to atmospherics because they are full of another kind of freedom and liberality.