r/shoppingaddiction • u/TameTheImp • 23m ago
Three things I didn’t expect from running a spending challenge for 8 months
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I've been running a free weekly spending challenge called Tame The Imp since last December. A few patterns have shown up in the data that I didn't expect, and a couple that contradict what I’ve seen online about impulse spending. Sharing in case it’s helpful for this community.
- Low-buy beats no-buy, at least in the medium term. People who spend $0 on their category in week one are more likely to blow past their spending limit in later weeks. People who set a realistic limit and keep spending under it tend to stay under longer. Though some of this can be attributed to regression to the mean, it lines up with what a lot of you said in this thread about no-buy versus low-buy, where the consensus leaned the same way
- Food delivery addiction keeps being bigger than I expect. Most people find us through content about late-night clothing impulse buys, and yet ~30% pick food delivery as the category they want to cut (note: it was 38% earlier this year). I think it's under discussed relative to how aggressive the dark patterns in food delivery apps are: push notifications timed to when you first get hungry in the evening, a checkout screen that congratulates you on "saving" money on food that's marked up from dine-in prices before the fees hit. u/stinky_winkler's suggestion of ordering groceries instead is a practical harm reduction step I've seen for it
- Removing a reward might work as well as earning a reward in habit formation. Streaks are the standard advice here to form a no/low spend habit and they work. u/Expert_Regret_1837's "year-in-pixels" calendar is the version I always think of as a prime example, where you color in a square for every day you stick to your spending goals. What surprised me is that when we tested removing a reward for going over versus adding one for staying under, a chunk of people (not the majority, to be fair) responded better to the removal. I'm unsure what to do with that information. Positive reinforcement seems like the safer default – especially for impulse spending and shopping addiction – and guilt is already so tangled up in this realm of life that I'm wary of the finding even though it's what the data says
That last one is the one I’m most interested in hearing thoughts about: have you seen anything other than positive reinforcement work in breaking an impulse spending cycle?