Emotional buying? You Betcha
Apr. 18—We Minnesotans have apparently been on an "emotional spending" binge during the pandemic.
Rehabs.com, which provides rehabilitation and addiction treatment resources, found Minnesota may be fertile ground for its services.
It conducted a nationwide poll and found that an average of 51% of respondents admitted to emotional spending because of stress, isolation — or while being drunk.
But in Minnesota 59% admitted to impulsive buying, particularly online shopping sprees. Nearly a third of Minnesotans surveyed said they treated themselves to more expensive alcohol and 15% admitted they hit the "buy" button while shopping drunk.
The definition of "emotional spending" covers pretty much everything. It's when you buy something you don't need and, in some cases, don't even really want, as a result of feeling stressed, bored, underappreciated, incompetent, unhappy, or even because you're feeling happy.
Psychologists say that if you find yourself wanting to buy something you didn't already want before you started shopping, don't buy it. Make yourself wait at least 24 hours before making a decision.
That sounds just like the kind of tripe psychologists peddle to us. Even if I didn't previously want that Mini Donut Maker I ran across on Amazon, how do those psychologists know I didn't really need and want it when I saw it?
If you want to get all psychological about it, maybe I've always subconsciously wanted and needed a Mini Donut Maker but that reasonable desire was repressed by a childhood trauma or something?
You can impulse buy anywhere, anytime — at the mall, online, at a garage sale, watching the Home Shopping Network at 2 a.m.
But Amazon makes emotional purchasing just such an easy click away. Like any new successful business model and new technology, Amazon has brought amazing changes that continue to effect the world. It made cloud computing a standard, added one-click purchasing and will likely soon make Prime drone deliveries common.
As much as we rely on their easy shopping, I have a hunch we may come to regret their dominance. Many feared Walmart and other big-box retailers would destroy other stores. They certainly changed the landscape, but smaller shops, hardware stores, grocers and niche retailers found ways to continue being successful and to grow.
Amazon's supremacy is likely to do more damage. Already many of those big boxes and major department stores everyone feared would dominate the retail landscape are falling prey to Amazon, closing locations or going out of business. Kiplinger predicts that Walmart grocery, Best Buy and Advance Auto Parts are among dozens of major retailers that Amazon is most likely to kill off in the coming years.
Still, I, like most everyone else, will keep helping Amazon.com continue on its decades-long unfettered growth.
After all, I may need to order the Mini Waffle Maker one night after a couple of glasses of wine. It'd go good with the Mini Donut Maker.
Still, those shrinks might have a point.
Maybe next time I get the hankering to log on to Amazon I'll check out Rehab.com instead.
Tim Krohn can be contacted at tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com or 507-344-6383.
