Impulse Purchases At the Supermarket

By definition, an impulse purchase is one that is spontaneous  and without pre-planning – i.e. it is ‘impulsive’. Impulse items tend to be unnecessary and indulgent. Studies have found that they tend to lift the mood of the shoppers for a while after the purchase is made.

At Evolution, we have looked closely at shopper behaviour in relation to planned and unplanned purchases. We believe that items purchased on a grocery shop can fall into one of three categories:

1. Fully planned items: These are items which the shopper entered the store expecting to buy.
2. Semi-planned items: These are not thought about before the shop but are purchased after the shopper notices certain stimuli in the store. E.g. remembering that you are out of milk as you walk past the fridges in the supermarket.
3. Unplanned item: An items that the shopper had no intention of buying when they entered the store. Shoppers may fancy a treat, or are taken by a certain promotion which encourages them to buy an item they otherwise had no intention to.  

There has been an abundance of research into what causes shoppers to make impulse purchases, from psychological, neurological and social perspectives. In reality there is probably an abundance of reasons why a particular shopper made the decision to buy that item they hadn't planned to – there is certainly no one theory fits all explanation. 

Recently, there has been a sharp decrease in sales of magazines in the US. Magazines are a classic category for impulse purchasing. They are placed near the tills to tempt shoppers into one final purchase before they pay for their shopping. However, the recent drop in sales has been attributed to the rise in use of smartphones. Shoppers are increasingly looking at their phones when waiting at the tills instead of looking at the items surrounding them, and are therefore not being tempted into buying them. This new phenomena has been labelled as the ‘mobile blinder’ and is being blamed for drops in sales. Cosmopolitan for example, saw sales fall 18.5% in the second half of 2012 alone. Retailers may have to find new ways of competing for shoppers attention if they want to keep up their sales of last-minute favourites such as sweets and chewing gum – and magazines of course.