If you judge by people’s actions and not words, the recession is far from over.
Cost-conscious Americans are finding themselves thinking twice about purchasing items at the store, placing them in their shopping carts and then ditching them when it’s time to pay up, according to the Associated Press.
Consumers are “leaving sweaters in the dress department, dumping cookies near the grocery cashier and waiting until the last minute to judge needs versus wants,” according to the article.
And the phenomenon isn’t just in a physical store — the same behavior applies online, where shoppers are filling up virtual shopping carts and then — click! — closing the window instead of actually buying anything.
The AP reports:
People “want to be in the act of shopping, but they don’t want to be in the act of buying,” said Joel Bines, a director at AlixPartners, a turnaround consultant.
It means more lost sales for stores at a time when there are already fewer customers because of the recession. For bricks-and-mortar shops already working with fewer staff, it also means higher labor costs because orphaned items have to be restocked.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but Burt P. Flickinger III, a retail consultant, estimates that in 25 percent of shoppers’ trips to the store, they’re ditching at least one item. In the recession of the early 1990s, it was 15 to 20 percent. In good times, it’s more like 10 percent.
The act of ditching a shopping cart — real or virtual — is called “orphaning,” and the few statistics available for this behavior point to a noticeable escalation beyond “window shopping.”
Have you orphaned a shopping cart lately?
