Why We Buy Things We Don't Need

You did not need another pair of shoes. You knew that. You bought them anyway.

This is not a moral failure. It is, in fact, one of the most well-documented phenomena in behavioural economics. And understanding it reveals something uncomfortable: the gap between what we think drives our spending and what actually does is enormous.

The Brain That Shops

Start with neuroscience, because it explains everything else. Shopping triggers dopamine — the neurotransmitter associated with anticipation and reward. Crucially, research shows that the dopamine spike mostly comes not at the moment of purchase, but during the imagining of ownership. The actual transaction is almost anticlimactic by comparison.

This is why window shopping rarely stays window shopping. The brain has already begun its reward cycle before the wallet opens. Retailers know this intimately. It is why ecommerce platforms are engineered to keep you in the browsing state as long as possible, with infinite scroll, personalized recommendations, and one-click checkout timed precisely to catch you at peak desire.

Impulse rather than deliberate intent drives up to 40% of ecommerce purchases: a staggering figure when you consider that global ecommerce revenue reached approximately $6.3 trillion in 2024. That means trillions of dollars spent annually on things people did not plan to buy.

We Are Not Shopping for Products. We Are Shopping for Feelings.

The deeper psychological mechanism is emotional regulation. People do not buy unnecessary things because they are irrational. They buy them because, at the moment, it works. A bad day at work, a bruised ego, a bout of loneliness: retail therapy provides a fast, accessible dopamine hit that temporarily overrides negative affect.

The problem is the word temporarily. The mood boost fades, the purchase remains, and the underlying emotion is still unaddressed. This creates a behavioral loop that marketers have spent decades optimising: DISCOMFORT —> DESIRE —> PURCHASE —> BRIEF RELIEF —> RETURN OF DISCOMFORT. Repeat.

This also explains why spending patterns shift during periods of collective stress. Consumer data consistently shows spikes in discretionary spending during economic uncertainty. Not despite the anxiety, but because of it. When control feels scarce, buying something is one of the few immediate actions that restores a sense of agency.

Status, Signals and Thorstein Veblen

Not all unnecessary purchases are emotionally driven. Some are social ones.

In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen coined the concept of conspicuous consumption: the idea that people buy certain goods not for their utility, but to signal wealth and status to others. These are sometimes called positional goods — where an item's main value lies in its scarcity and its ability to grant higher social standing relative to others. The product's actual usefulness becomes secondary to its role as a marker of financial capacity.

What Veblen could not have anticipated was social media — a platform that has industrialized status signalling at scale. The logic of conspicuous consumption, once limited by physical visibility, now operates 24/7 across algorithmically curated feeds. You do not need to wear the shoes in public if you can post them first. The audience is larger, the feedback is instant, and the pressure to participate is structural.

The Veblen Effect describes the counterintuitive phenomenon where demand for certain goods actually increases as price rises, because the high price is the point. For instance, a luxury bag at half the price would be less desirable, not more, because the status signal would be diluted. This is not irrationality. Within the logic of social signalling, it is perfectly coherent.

The Digital Machine

The third force is technological — and it is the newest, fastest evolving one.

The architecture of modern ecommerce is not neutral. Heightened emotional arousal is linked to diminished self-control, fostering impulsive purchasing — and platforms are specifically designed to generate that arousal. Scarcity cues ("only 2 left"), countdown timers, flash sales and social proof notifications ("4 people are viewing this right now") all exploit cognitive shortcuts that evolved for a world where scarcity was real and social consensus was a reliable signal of value.

FOMO (fear of missing out) is particularly potent. The combination of FOMO and impulsive buying in online settings creates an environment where consumers feel compelled to act swiftly, often overlooking financial consequences. Livestream shopping, which exploded in Asian markets and is now growing globally, layers real-time social pressure on top of three mechanisms: you are not just shopping, you are watching other people shop, in a live format designed to feel more like entertainment than commerce.

Buy Now, Pay Later services complete the picture by decoupling the physiological pain of spending from its financial reality. When a $300 purchase becomes "four payments of $75", loss aversion (the well-documented tendency to feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains) is effectively defused. The purchase feels smaller. The debt does not.

So What?

Understanding why we buy things we don't need is not just academically interesting. It has real implications for how we think about financial behavior, consumer regulation and the design of digital platforms.

The standard economic model assumes rational agents making deliberate choices. The evidence suggests something messier: humans optimising for emotional relief, social approval and dopamine — in real time, against opponents who have studied our psychology in detail and built billion-dollar systems to exploit it.

This is not an argument for fatalism. Awareness of these mechanisms is itself a form of resistance. But it does suggest that the question "why did you buy that?" is rarely answered by looking at the product. More often, the answer is found in how you were feeling, who you were trying to impress, or what notification arrived at exactly the right — or wrong — moment.