Early in the pandemic, Ms. Joss had begun ordering bottles from her neighborhood wine shop. When restaurants in the area began offering groceries, she bought them. She wanted to support local businesses and was able to justify those indulgences — and some TikTok-inspired spending on clothing and skin care — by telling herself that she was saving money by not going out.
She has since realized that her spending is unsustainable. “First it was because the pandemic is happening, and the world is on fire, and climate change, and family members are sick,” Ms. Joss said. “But it’s, like, things will always be bad.”
Ms. Mohn, who said she had not previously shopped online often, now finds it hard to resist. “All my cards are now saved on everything — on my computer, on my phone,” she said, noting the rise of shopping apps that allow users to purchase items from many brands and to track deliveries. “Oh, I can get that here by tomorrow? Perfect, I’m just going to order it right now. I feel like it’s made me trigger-happy. It’s made it easier for me to pretend it’s Monopoly money.”
Drazen Prelec, a professor of management science and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained that the instrument we used to spend mattered greatly: Merely holding a credit card in your hand creates an expectation that you will spend, just because you have used it to spend before.
“In fact,” he said, “two different credit cards can give you two different cravings.”
“If you use the Amex, let’s say, for luxury dinners and so on, and you use something else for gasoline, they’re not going to create the same craving, because the history is different,” he added.
Lauren Larson
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