Where the lift is

Think back over the bag, and this time follow your mood and not the parcel.

At nine o'clock you're flat. By twenty past you're absorbed, and by the time you've chosen tan you're enjoying yourself. The moment of paying is a small high point. On Wednesday and Thursday there are echoes, the dispatch email and the tracking page and the thought of it waiting at home. Opening the box is a second, smaller peak. Then the line drops back to wherever your week was anyway, and the bag goes on top of the wardrobe.

Nearly all the pleasure came before you owned the thing. After you owned it there were about four minutes in the hall.

Marsha Richins, a marketing professor, tested this pattern directly. In three studies, one of which followed the same people over time, she measured the emotions that products stirred up before and after purchase. She was interested in people who score high on materialism. In her sense that means people who expect that getting things will make them happier and change their lives in ways that matter. Those people showed a clear rise in good feeling before buying and a decline after. She concluded that for them, wanting and anticipating a product may be more pleasurable than owning it.

I should be straight about the limits. People who scored low on materialism didn't show the pattern. So this isn't a law about all shoppers. My reading is that on a Tuesday night like the one in chapter 1, you've joined the high scorers for the evening. You're expecting a purchase to change how you feel. That's my interpretation and not her finding, but it fits what happened to the bag.

Other work points the same way. Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich ran four studies on waiting, and found that people get real happiness from anticipation, before anything has arrived. At the severe end, the psychiatrist Donald Black reviewed the research on compulsive buying and described four phases, which he called anticipation, preparation, shopping and spending. He notes that the purchase that ends the sequence is often followed by a sense of let-down. Those are patients, and their buying is on a different scale from yours. The order is the same as yours, though.

A firework is a fair picture of it. The pleasure is in the climb and the burst, and nobody goes looking for the stick afterwards. A lift purchase is a firework where the stick costs sixty-eight pounds and has to be stored.

This changes what the sixty-eight pounds bought. You thought you were buying a bag and getting a nice feeling thrown in. It's closer to the truth that you were buying a nice feeling and getting a bag thrown in. The feeling was used up by Thursday evening. The bag is what's left over, and it's the part you paid for.

That's also why the habit repeats so neatly. If the pleasure were in the bag, owning the bag would go on supplying it, and you wouldn't need to be back on the sofa a week later. The pleasure is in the run-up, so the only way to get it again is to start another run-up. The delivery marks the end of the good part.

If a parcel is already on its way to you, you can test this. Notice when you feel best about it. I'd bet it's before the knock on the door.