How the Internet Makes Money By Making Us Feel Bad
Low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression promote impulse purchases, which power many of the internet’s profit machines.
During the early days of the pandemic, a lot of people were stuck at home feeling freaked out, isolated, and vulnerable. Those turned out to be boom times for online retailers.
Compared to the year before the pandemic, E-commerce sales surged by 43% in 2020, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. While some of that is no doubt due to the fact that people were forced to shop online, rather than in-person, American consumer surveys noted an 18% hike in impulse purchases during the first month of the pandemic. Meanwhile, research in the journal PLOS ONE found that stress, anxiety, depression, and other negative mood states fueled a huge uptick in lockdown-era shopping among Italian consumers.
“Our sample reported, on average, an increase of about 61% in the general spending level during the lockdown, and we found that negative emotions and mood states explained this increase,” says Rocco Palumbo, PhD, first author of that PLOS ONE study and a Harvard-educated professor of psychology at the University G. D’Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara, Italy.
