Trying Harder and Doing Worse: How Grocery Shoppers Track In-Store Spending
1Koert van Ittersum is Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology.
koert.vanittersum@mgt.gatech.eduJoost M.E. Pennings, 2
2Joost M.E. Pennings is Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, and Alex Investment Bank Professor of Finance, Department of Finance, Maastricht University, the Netherlands; he is AST Professor in Commodity Futures Market, Wageningen University, the Netherlands; and he is Research Fellow, Office of Futures and Options Research, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
joost.pennings@finance.unimaas.nlBrian Wansink3
3Brian Wansink is John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, Cornell University.
wansink@cornell.eduAbstract
Although almost one in three U.S. households shops on a budget, it remains unclear whether and how shoppers track their in-store spending to stay within those budgets. A field study and two laboratory studies offer four key generalizations about budget shoppers in grocery stores: (1) They predominantly use mental computation strategies to track their in-store spending, (2) they adapt their mental computation strategy to the dominant range of price endings of items in their shopping baskets, (3) those who try to calculate the exact total price of their basket are less accurate than those who estimate the approximate price, and (4) motivated shoppers are less accurate than less motivated shoppers (because they tend to calculate rather than estimate the total basket price). A second field study demonstrates that shoppers who underestimate the total price of their basket are more likely to overspend, leading to negative store satisfaction.
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Online publication date: 1-Apr-2012.
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