However a new study has found that it’s actually a really unwise decision to shop for anything at all on an empty stomach.
It seems that hunger leads us to buy anything, from very-bad-for-you snacks to highly improbable and deeply unflattering items of clothing.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, researchers unpicked the phenomenon of hunger spending.
It turns out that when we’re hungry just about anything will do.
“[H]unger renders acquisition-related concepts and behaviors more accessible” they wrote.
As Tom Jacobs writes of the study, “It appears that, when tempted by things to buy, the internal message ‘I want food’ gets pared down to simply ‘I want.'”
Think about what you might put in your trolley when practically delirious with hunger, and then think about what damage you might do to your credit card – and relationship – when buying a present for your mother-in-law.
“We’d like to make consumers aware of the possibility that if they go shopping on an empty stomach, they might spend more money than they intend to,” lead researcher of the study Alison Jing Xu, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.
She also had this matter-of-fact piece of advice for future shoppers in The New Scientist. “So [they] better feed themselves before they go out.”
Or you could just make like everybody else and online shop while eating a tub of Ben & Jerry’s that you bought in a famished pre-dinner grocery shop at the same time. Funnily enough, it might save you money.
