Why do sales make us buy more?
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tl;dr
Sales work by anchoring (the crossed-out price makes the new one feel like a gain) and loss aversion (missing a deal feels like losing money). Both push you to buy things you never planned to — a discount only saves money on what you'd have bought anyway.
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A sale is not really about the item. It is about the number printed next to it — the old price, struck through. That number is an anchor: your brain grabs the first figure it sees and judges everything against it. Suddenly the question is not "do I want this?" but "can I walk away from a gap this wide?" Add a ticking clock and a purchase limit, and a store has quietly rewritten the decision you thought you were making.
The anchor does the selling
Psychologists call it anchoring — the first number you see becomes the reference for every number after it. A jacket at $60 is just a jacket. A jacket marked down from $120 to $60 is a bargain, even though the item and the price are identical. Marketing researchers Wansink, Kent, and Hoch showed how far this stretches in a 1998 supermarket field study: soup with no purchase limit sold about 3.3 cans per buyer, but a sign reading "limit of 12 per person" pushed the average to 7. The sign gave shoppers a bigger number to adjust down from, and their carts followed.
Losing a deal hurts more than paying full price
The second engine is loss aversion. Kahneman and Tversky's work found that losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equal gains — in their 1992 estimates, more than twice. A sale exploits this by reframing a purchase as an escape: buy now and you "save" $40; wait and you "lose" it. Nothing was ever yours, but the countdown timer makes the higher future price feel like a penalty for hesitating. That is why "ends tonight" moves more product than "good price."
The savings that cost you money
Here is the quiet trick: a discount only saves money on something you were going to buy anyway. Every extra item that entered the cart because of the red tag is not savings — it is spending, cheerfully mislabeled. Stores plan their markdowns into the price calendar; the sale rack is not charity, it is choreography. The defense is one question, asked before you check the tag: would I buy this at this price if nothing were crossed out?
cited
Sources
- [01]Wansink, Kent & Hoch (1998), An Anchoring and Adjustment Model of Purchase Quantity Decisions, Journal of Marketing Research
“Anchor-based promotions — multiple-unit prices, purchase quantity limits, and suggestive selling — can increase purchase quantities.”
- [02]A meta-analysis of loss aversion in risky contexts, Journal of Economic Psychology (2024)
“Losses loom larger than gains — Tversky and Kahneman (1992) estimated the loss aversion coefficient at 2.25.”
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Keep asking
What is the anchoring effect in shopping?
Anchoring means the first number you see becomes your reference point. A $60 jacket looks ordinary alone, but marked down from $120 it reads as a bargain — your brain judges the deal by the gap, not the price you actually pay.
Does buying things on sale actually save money?
Only if you would have bought the item at full price anyway. If the discount itself triggered the purchase, the money spent is new spending, not savings — no matter what the tag says you "saved".
Why do limited-time offers feel so urgent?
Because of loss aversion: research since Kahneman and Tversky shows losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equal gains. A deadline reframes not-buying as losing the discount, and your brain treats that imagined loss like real money slipping away.
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