Keep Forgetting to Make a Shopping List? Don’t Beat Yourself up over It!

ABSTRACT

This study aims to determine the impact of shopping lists on consumer spending and healthy shopping behaviors. A non-hypothetical field experiment was conducted, using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turks, to determine the value 228 consumers place on these self commitment devices via their willingness-to-accept (to give up their list) or equivalent gain (to write a list) for a shopping list during a grocery shopping trip. By randomly determining who kept and who gave up shopping lists, we are able to explore causal effects of lists on food spending and the healthiness of food purchases. We find that after controlling for conscientiousness, consumers willingness-to-accept to give up their shopping list is $5.05, while the equivalent gain to write a shopping list is $3.87. We did not however find a significant difference in the healthiness of the purchases made by consumers using a shopping list versus those without. There is a lack of prior research on this topic – particularly papers that use a random assignment to treatment. Previous studies have explored correlations between shopping list use and spending; however, this study provides a value of list use, utilizes a credible approach to determine impact of list use disentangled from unobserved confounds, and provides insights on impact of shopping lists on healthy eating.

KEYWORDS:

• Shopping list
• self-commitment devices
• willingness-to-accept
• equivalent gain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Survey available from authors upon request.

² Original receipt/list data available upon request. Receipts or lists that were unreadable, incomplete, or stock photos were not included in the analysis. Items on receipts/lists that were unidentifiable were not included in the analysis.

³ For example, if “chicken” was on a shopping list, then “Chicken – NS” was chosen from the FoodData database because the piece of the chicken was not specified. If ”chicken breast” was on a shopping list, then ”Chicken Breast – NFS” was chosen from the FoodData database.

⁴ Additional demographic characteristics related to income and children were not asked in wave 1 of the survey, and therefore were not included in this portion of the analysis.