The shop is ready for you

So far I've talked as though this all happens inside your head. It doesn't. On the other side of the screen is a business whose job is to turn a passing want into a sale before the want passes. That's an ordinary thing for a shop to want. But it helps to see how well prepared it is.

Start with paying. Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein pointed out in 1998 that spending money hurts a little at the moment you do it. They called this the pain of paying. It's useful, because it's the moment your mind weighs the thing against the money. They also noted that the hurt depends on how tightly the payment is tied to the purchase. Handing over cash ties the two closely. Cards loosen the tie, because the money leaves later and somewhere you can't see.

Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava tested this in four studies. People were willing to spend more when a credit card logo was present than when it wasn't. They spent more with vouchers than with cash of the same value. Anything that made parting with money less vivid made spending easier.

Now think about how you paid for the bag. You didn't count out notes or type in a card number. Your details were saved, and paying was one tap with your thumb. It may have offered to split the cost into three payments, which cuts one small pain into three that you'll barely feel. My reading is that the moment your mind was supposed to weigh the bag against sixty-eight pounds has been taken out of the process on purpose.

Then there's hurry. In 2019 a team at Princeton led by Arunesh Mathur sent an automated crawler round about eleven thousand shopping websites and examined some fifty-three thousand product pages. They found 1,818 examples of design tricks that push shoppers towards buying, on about one site in nine. There were 393 countdown timers and 632 low-stock messages. When they checked the timers by visiting again, 157 of them were false. The clock ran down and reset, or it reached zero and the offer carried on as before. They also found twenty-two companies selling these devices to shops ready-made.

A countdown timer exists to stop you asking the question from chapter 5. If the offer ends in fourteen minutes, there's no time to find out whether you'll want the thing tomorrow.

Add the rest. The email arrives in the evening because that's when people buy. The advert follows you from site to site because you looked once. At the checkout it tells you that people who bought this also bought that. None of it needs a villain. Thousands of businesses have each tested what works, and what works is whatever reaches you when your guard is down.

I don't say this so that you'll feel angry, though you may. I say it for two reasons.

One is that the ease you feel when you buy says nothing about your character. Skilled people have spent years removing every pause between the want and the purchase. You're a tired person on a sofa, up against a well-funded system that never gets tired. If you keep losing, that's what anyone would expect.

The other is that the pauses can be put back. You can delete a saved card and unsubscribe from the emails, and you can remove an app from your phone. Each of these gives you back a few seconds of the pain of paying, and those seconds are when the question gets asked. Chapter 15 lists them.