Why do you keep adding to your shopping cart — Retail Therapy Phenomenon
Ever since the brutal Covid-19 entered our lives, the world has befallen into gloom and darkness. At this point, where can we find happiness? For two years, all we have witnessed is grief, pain, and suffering whether it be in the form of new variants of coronavirus sweeping off lives from the surface of the earth, the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Australian fires, or the ongoing Ukrainian war. Each of these catastrophic events has only brought further misery into our lives. In all this darkness, where can we look for light? We all got cut off as we were quarantined in our houses. Socialization was minimal. The only connection left — the internet. Many made productive use of this time while quarantined in their homes while others drowned further in depression. At this point, the world experienced a boom in the growth of e-commerce. When people were first hesitant to shop online for fear of getting scammed, now going out for shopping seems like a laborious chore to them. We saw a boom of small, online businesses with Instagram becoming a leading marketing hub, later followed by TikTok. Instagram then rushed to introduce various new features like Instagram music, closed captions, and most importantly reels, for better consumer interaction with content creators and business owners. Previously, when Amazon and Ali Express held the monopoly of e-commerce, the emergence of small, online businesses swept the floor when they interacted with their customers on a personal level. Appealing packaging as well as thank you cards and freebies really upped the customer experience game. Aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs found a rent-free marketplace to run their businesses. With online shopping came the complementary demand for courier service and mailing companies. Dreams screened into reality as Millenials and Gen Z witnessed a roar in entrepreneurship. All of this is viewed as a behind-the-scenes process. Let’s shine some light on how buying customers and third-party spectators perceived the situation. Drowned in depression, cut off from their loved ones, customers looked for happiness with social media as their only way left to communicate with the rest of the world. Scrolling through their feeds, they found goods with eye-catching product photography that momentarily cheered them up. Placing an order flooded their brains with serotonin. And now the wait; the wait for the parcel to arrive. When the delivery man rang the doorbell, another flush of serotonin followed. And so, the customers entered into the vicious cycle of materialistic happiness in an attempt to recover their disturbed mental health. Following the advent of covid-19, people are looking for happiness in an attempt to return to their normal lives. What they have failed to understand is that this is the new normal.
Most of the small businesses that have been set up following coronavirus are sellers of luxury products. However, these luxury products have been marketed in a way to make the consumer think that this is their key to happiness. In simpler words, this is what they need to improve their mental health. If I may say, the elasticity of demand for luxury products is shifting from being elastic to inelastic. Well that’s ironic, isn’t it? Productivity planners, scented candles, subscription boxes, and products as such are being advertised as a necessity for a healthy lifestyle and an illusionary path back to a normal life. People are surviving on puny, euphoric moments of placing orders and receiving their parcels. The meaning of happiness has reformed for humans over these two catastrophic years. Happiness for this generation is not long-lasting. The concept of retail therapy has therefore taken a new face and has cut down other forms of therapy. Meditation and exercise were eliminated from the race as the air became contaminated with Covid-19 and gyms shut down due to lockdown. Counseling seemed far-fetched as people exited from the habit of human contact. Hence, they found materialistic happiness in the silhouette of online shopping. “Aesthetic” became the new way of life. Might I add that during this time, we also witnessed a boom in blogging. People shared snippets of their Instagrammable lives during the corona time which later became the permanent way of living. Every dear moment had to be captured in the form of Instagram stories. The digital media took us all prisoners in its inescapable fist.
Many companies are taking the initiative of working from home with employees only required to visit the office in person three days a week. This shift in the working environment has its negative impact. While it is giving employees the opportunity to focus on their hobbies and start a side hustle, it’s further cutting down on human contact and socialization and slowly nudging us to the inevitable world of Metaverse. It all appears to be a well-orchestrated grand scheme. From Covid-19 spreading to losing human contact to indulging in materialistic happiness and finally the dawn of the Metaverse, the shift towards a digital world is reorienting the meaning of happiness for humans.
