Whatever your shopping habits, chances are you like the idea of getting a bargain. But do you know what that does to your head?
The days and weeks leading up to Black Friday reflect this feverish appetite: You can’t go online without being bombarded with advertisements and offers of supposed special promotions in the run-up to Christmas.
And traditional retailers love making sales too. Joining a long line of fellow bargain hunters outside big box stores the day after Christmas is something of a festive tradition for some.
But it’s not always a completely civilized event. Just recently, when French kitchenware brand Le Creuset organized a flash sale in the English town of Andover, police were called in to control the crowd. People had traveled from miles away and waited for hours to get their hands on some discounted luxury pots and pans.
In previous Black Friday sales, bargain hunters engage in physical battles for the most popular products. In the United States, one was created to record injuries — and even deaths — occurring during the annual shopping event.
Everything happens in the nucleus accumbens
It therefore seems that discounted products are a highly appreciated feature in modern society.
This is due, in part, to a chemical reaction in our brainwhich encourages us to buy something when we come across reduced prices. When we see a price tag that we think is a good deal, the part of our brain that deals with pleasure (the nucleus accumbens) is activated.
This means that people feel a high level of satisfaction when they find and buy a bargain. The nucleus accumbens, along with other reward-related brain regions, also plays a role in emotional processing, largely in combination with the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers and is associated with feelings of happiness. When people see images of things they want to buy, the region of the brain with dopamine receptors is activated. When they shop, they get a “shot” of dopamine and feel good about what they are doing. If you add to this the fact that dopamine also makes people more impulsive in making decisions, it’s easy to understand why consumers get excited about discounts.
The thrill of the hunt
Therefore, if consumers like to feel rewarded and gratified, it is up to retailers to provide these rewards and gratifications. And they work hard to do so, using a variety of strategies to help clients get their dopamine fix. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of shopping is like having a set of persuasion tools for stores large and small.
One of these tools involves shopping offers that are only available during short periods of timeto generate a extra feeling of urgency. This causes even higher levels of adrenaline, which makes people feel giddy with excitement at the prospect of bagging a bargain, and is one of the reasons we see sales associated with a particular day, week or month.
One Countdown timer on a website has a similar effectmaking consumers feel like they might miss out on the opportunity if they don’t act immediately.
Control yourself!
The good news is that consumers can, in fact, resist their biological impulses and restrain themselves from falling for the lure of a bargain. However, some self-control.
When faced with a low-priced product, Don’t give in to temptation and don’t buy it right away. Take some time to decide. If you’re physically in the store and worried about someone else buying it, take the item with you and walk around a bit. Over time, the urgency of your initial reaction will lessen. And as the adrenaline sets in, you’ll likely feel less compelled to buy it.
The same principle applies online. Stop for a moment, step away from your screen and do something else for a while so that the urge to shop for a bargain subsides a little. Whatever the item, and however big the discount, you may end up realizing that it’s not as essential to your life as your brain initially thought.
