Why is purchase pleasure? (Part 1)
I’m thinking about shopping holidays today, in honor of BFCM, an initialism I hadn’t seen until this year—it means Black Friday and Cyber Monday, though I guess this year it’s really the latter. The fact that shopping holidays exist at all, and that a number of holidays have turned into them over the years, with Labor Day sales on all things grilling and Memorial Day for kitchen appliances, can seem at first insidious, though no one is going to call for the end of the crass commercialization of, and war on, Labor Day. But it makes sense. Shopping is a great pleasure. A number of my friends have reported to me how, with COVID-19 restricting other options, online shopping has become an incredible source of comfort, dopamine on a discount.
The joy of shopping goes beyond just what we purchase, and I think that this fact abets many of our consumerist tendencies. The outsized joy that we receive long before we purchase the product powers a number of habits: it’s why avid readers and avid gamers find themselves with a backlog of books and games that they haven’t gotten around to. It leads to so much new stuff that we simply don’t need.
As I become more mindful of my consumption, I aim to explore this deep pleasure in purchase. To that end, here are four things that make purchasing pleasurable to me.
Little Presents for a Future Self
“It’s a little present to yourself, you deserve a little treat.” These are the words that I say to my friends, and my friends say to me, when we want to enable each other’s purchases. The idea is simple: we are deserving of self-care, we should be our own baes, and so we should buy things for ourselves.
I think that this is one of the reasons why purchasing things online is so pleasurable to me: by purchasing myself a little present, I don’t need to have a particular reason for purchasing the product. When I buy a game on Steam, its intended recipient is not me today but me at some date in the future, and I can feel good now because I have been an effective steward of myself, self-caring diligently.
By making the recipient of the product some future figure removed from present needs, I can make any frivolous purchase into something to be proud of. The me of a few days from now, or even a year from now, will certainly thank me for this.
Now, this person in the future rarely ends up as enamored with the product as I think they will. That is because my future self is an actual person, with actual needs, very few of which are the books and baubles and games that I buy them. But me in the present can fantasize without bounds how much this person in the future will be so glamorized by my spending habits. When I click the purchase button, I can care for this phantom person so well that I can’t help but feel glee.
The Moral: I think that the person we envision using the product has very little relationship with how we actually are. Some items I threw away when moving exemplify this: a pink cowboy hat, a pair of sunglasses, an unopened DVD copy of Argo. The Being Frugal blog proposes the following trick that I think I might use: we should write down any big present for ourselves, and then wait thirty days before reevaluating this potential purchase. Now that our future self has arrived, and is a real person rather than some distant entity, they can judge for themselves whether the purchase would be suitable.
Little Presents for a Present Self
Of course, I do often purchase things so that I can treat myself today or tomorrow. The most common version of this is a little treat from a local bakery, or picking up Starbucks in the airport.
This type of pleasure is more innocent. It’s difficult to fantasize too much about how much a bag of popcorn will make me happy, and often this treats hit the spot!
But, this brings us to the thorny and well-documented fact that our concept of self-care is lacking. We believe that taking care of the self requires indulgences. Our culture has made caring for ourselves and having little treats synonymous. So, I have felt guilty for not purchasing a piping hot cup of coffee, or a pastry or a bagel. I feel like a bad parent! That I am being too strict on myself; that I can spare the rod at least this once. Even when I pursue activities that I know make me happier than walking down the road to buy a pastry, like drawing or blogging, I have that sense of guilt. For just one dollar, I could sate that guilt, two dollars if I wanted to splurge on a Coke Zero.
The Moral: I don’t know yet how to divorce myself from this culture that mistakes self-indulgence for self-care. While I don’t think we should abstain all the time from these little treats—the cup of coffee I bought in the Seattle airport made my layover bearable and productive—I think we should examine how much of our pleasure comes from the actual experience of the little treat and how much comes from this well-documented guilt trip. Yes, these purchases are more likely to be beneficial than those given to some future self, but this still provides a layer of pleasure that needs to be accounted for.
Shopping as a Sport
Shopping is not just how we get our goods but a hobby, a (contact) sport.
You can get good at shopping! There are tools, (like Honey) and trade publications (like Wirecutter, and The Inventory, and for fans of cash back and miles, The Points Guy). The game and sportsmanship and intellectual craft of shopping is joyous long before you punch in your credit card information. Shopping for a big purchase can be a incredibly intellectually rewarding activity involving comparing specs, prices and considering the possibility of a sale. And, if you buy used, you can even perfect the art of haggling.
I like hard problems, and I like getting better at solving hard problems. And over the years, I have become quite good at shopping. I know when the Steam sales will be coming, and I think I’ve become talented at identifying when to buy a single item and when to buy in bulk. I’m an expert.
Or, am I? For example, my nice gaming laptop has a massive solid-state drive, but the games I play don’t require hardware anywhere near as sophisticated. How much time did I spend comparing specs when purchasing this machine? Was that time actually used to my benefit? It was certainly fun solving this problem—I started by noting that I had a discount through my employer for Dell laptops, which constricted the decision space to something I could reasonably survey, and then I read a number of reviews and asked my hardware enthusiast friends to tell me what they would prefer. It was a fun process! Even if I didn’t need specs so sophisticated, it was a good five hours spent.
But this habit is certainly time intensive. I used to read The Wirecutter daily, and I would daily review the lightning deals on Amazon. I still haven’t bought a gaming console for this generation, and likely will not given the high caliber of my laptop, and yet I read the reviews for Switch exclusives and PS5 exclusives so that I can optimally make this purchase that I am likely to never make.
The act of shopping scratches all of the same itches as a Sudoku puzzle: something you can slowly get better at, and which really engages your brain.
The Moral: Maybe another example will explicate this best—I spent maybe three hours the other day researching robot vacuums, and almost came close to buying one. The intellectual exercise of comparing specifications was such a joy. There’s a wide range of models, and AIs. But, I don’t need a robot vacuum! Furthermore, when I was looking into robot vacuums, I was in the middle of moving, and had no idea if I would end up in an apartment where a robot vacuum would make sense.
Don’t let the sport of shopping trick you into a purchase you don’t need. There is no leader board for best shopper or for speedrunning buying the perfect pencil sharpener.
Shopping as a Gacha Game
The name of the game when it comes to shopping is Variable Rewards. This, I think, is the icing on the cake for why the act of shopping is so fun.
As Nir Eyal explains in the above link, variable rewards, where the outcome of an activity depends at least in part on luck, hooks us. It’s why gambling feels great! This is true of shopping: while we can all get better at recognizing a deal, and can all use Honey to track price cuts on our favorite products, the ROI of any shopping experience will change if Amazon sets up a lightning deal. It’s one of the reason that Steam’s sales are so addicting, and people wait and watch for them with dedicated websites: there is a chance that you purchase the game of your dreams a week before it goes on sale by 50%. The variable nature of Amazon’s deals had me hooked, and kept me coming back to the lightning deal page day after day.
Shopping reminds me of a gacha game: there’s skill, but there’s also a lot of luck. Gacha games, for those unaware, are a genre of video game that include paying for the chance to win in-game content as a core mechanic. For example, in Genshin Impact, the player can choose to purchase a “pull” where, for a few dollars, they can win highly-leveled characters to aid them in their quest. As Washington Post’s game critic Gene Park notes, this is gambling, and this variable reward system can sink their teeth into players (Park, a grown adult, ended up spending $130 on Genshin Impact’s pull system, and children are often even worse victims to these traps). I have easily spent $130 this year on games I haven’t played, all because of attractive deals.
The Moral: I don’t think you can purchase new goods without walking into the casino that the big shopping outlets have constructed. Every online shopping site does this. With the terms of the game so set up, I can’t think of any way to intentionally get out of this trap, other than to use discretion and judgment, to be mindful. I plan to address this more later, but the entire internet is a gambler’s paradise, where the price of a pair of sunglasses are the poker hands.