So I’m at Home Depot to buy a hundred dollar garden bench. This was the plan. Really. And while I was wandering around the garden section, I found these cute five dollar hangers for pots. Then I saw some discounted annuals. Three dollar Pansies. Even I can grow pansies. Throw them in the cart. I mean, really, it’s almost free. I was already spending one hundred dollars! Then I saw some ten dollar solar lights for my garden. Hey, they were only 7.99 on sale! Throw them in. Okay, now some 99 cent seed packets and a $5.00 hose attachment. I mean, come on, it’s only five bucks. I was there to spend a hundred. What’s five bucks?

I always tell myself I can throw anything in my cart, but it doesn’t mean I’ll buy it. So before I hit the checkout stand, I added up my “freebies”. They came to forty bucks. Oh, and the hundred I was already planning on spending.

What was going on here? I was experiencing a shopping phenomenon that actually has a name: It’s called “decreasing sensitivity to losses.” George Lowenstein is a cutting edge researcher in the hot new field of “neuroeconomics”, at Carnegie Mellon. And he warns against this. (I’m really fascinated by this new field of “neuroeconomics”. I just can’t help it. I’m a money coach who has a masters in “consciousness studies”, so it’s not a surprise, though perhaps a bit nerdy.  It’s a combo of psychology, economics and neuroscience. )

Basically, you want to be careful about buying too much in one store. When you spend a large amount at a store (my hundred dollars) then everything else feels cheaper there then it normally would. It’s all relative, right? So when you start buying a lot of small items, they start feeling free.

If you go to another store to buy these small things, they don’t feel so free. I doubt I would have spent the forty bucks there if I hadn’t been about to part with a hundred dollars.

I find this type of research really helpful. First of all, it tells me that I’m pretty normal. My brain is just as likely as anyone else’s to experience this. I’m really a pretty smart cookie. And now that I’m more aware of this “phenomenon”, I’m less likely to fall prey to it.

I could say, “Would I still buy all of this stuff if I wasn’t spending the hundred?” Or I could simply put it all back and tell myself that if I still wanted it, I could come back a different time and buy it. But that gets into delayed gratification, and that’s a different post.

For now, I’ll try to be aware of adding a ton of “free” things when I’m spending a hundred bucks.