It’s nearly Black Friday and holiday sales are heating up. It may feel like the perfect time to score a great deal, but a consumer behaviour expert at the University of Guelph warns the holiday shopping season can be problematic for some.
Dr. Sunghwan Yi, a professor in the Gordon S. Lang School of Economics, researches compulsive buying. He says the disorder doesn’t receive a lot of attention, but it can devastate people’s finances and interpersonal relationships.
Yi says compulsive buyers have lost control over their buying, adding they continue to shop to cope with negative emotions about themselves but derive little use from the things they purchase. Impulse buying is often a precursor to compulsive buying, but shoppers still retain a moderate degree of control, making purchases to get a short-term emotional boost.
Yi says impulse buying can worsen during the holiday season, when stores offer limited-time sales to lure customers into quick decisions about items they might not need.
“Many people often start buying things for their loved ones in preparation for the holiday season, but they end up buying lots of things for themselves. This is totally understandable, but it is important to exercise self-control,” he says. “These sales are not as scarce as you might think. It is important for you not to be misled.”
Online shopping makes it easier to make impulse decisions, Yi adds, since people often save address and credit card information on their devices.
“When all that information is already there, all it takes is one click to purchase,” he says.
“I recommend erasing that information from your phone and browser. Then, when you take a moment to type it in, you might pause and decide you don’t need the item you were about to buy in the heat of the moment.”
In a recent paper, Yi re-evaluated the existing self-report scales for compulsive buying disorder to propose four factors that underlie compulsive buyers’ behavioural patterns, to help identify risky shopping behaviours.
“The scale is innovative because it could provide early intervention for people who are starting to have problems with excessive buying but not yet experiencing financial or interpersonal problems,” Yi says. “Most existing self-report scales of compulsive buying emphasize identifying people who are already suffering financial and interpersonal problems from their buying patterns. Our scale helps also identify people who are not quite there yet but are starting to experience reduced/diminished control over their buying.”
Yi’s tools can be accessed through an online self-assessment on his research website.
Yi is available for interviews.
Contact:
Dr. Sunghwan Yi
syi@uoguelph.ca