Cash Doesn't Buy Junk Food

A new research published in the Journal of Consumer Research tried to find out how come people who pay with credit or debit cards buy more unhealthy foods than those who pay with cash.

To find out the reason behind this behavior, the authors carried out an analysis of the shopping behavior of 1,000 families, over a six-month period.

After analyzing the results of the experiment, they concluded that when people paid with credit/debit cards, they bought much more impulsive and unhealthy food products, then when they paid cash.

After assessing follow-up studies, the authors found out that this 'power' of opting for healthy foods that cash has, is simply due to the 'pain' that people feel when they pay this way; and the more sensitive the consumer is to the pain of cash payment, the stronger the positive effect is.

Authors Manoj Thomas – Cornell University, Kalpesh Kaushik Desai – State University of New York, Binghamton, and Satheeshkumar Seenivasan – State University of New York, Buffalo, explain this phenomenon in their paper, and say that there are two factors that contribute to this effect.

The first one is “a correlation between unhealthiness and impulsiveness of food items – unhealthy food items also tend to elicit impulsive responses,” and the second one is that “cash payments are psychologically more painful than card payments, and this pain of payment can curb the impulsive responses to buy unhealthy food items.”

There are many people who struggle every day to make healthy choices when it comes to food, so maybe if they understood that a credit/debit card rises they odds of buying junk food, they could control themselves better.

“The notion that mode of payment can curb impulsive purchase of unhealthy food products is substantially important.

“The epidemic increase in obesity suggests that regulating impulsive purchases and consumption of unhealthy food products is a steep challenge for many consumers,” say the authors.

They suggests that if people changed their way of payment, this might influence on obesity rates and this is rather important as according to the Centers for Disease Control, 34% of US adults are obese, and nearly 40% of all purchases in 2006 were paid by credit and debit cards.