Consumer Behavior

Why retailers may want to offer coffee to shoppers

Photo by istock.com

September 16, 2022

Consumers who drink coffee, tea and other caffeine-infused drinks right before shopping spend more money and buy more products and they also tend to make impulse buys.

Those are findings from a study on how caffeine consumption before shopping influences purchase behavior. The study abstract states that consuming a caffeinated (versus non-caffeinated) beverage before shopping enhances impulsivity in terms of higher number of items purchased and higher spending.

In one of the study experiments 145 shoppers in a home goods retail location drank espresso or a non-caffeinated drink. Those who drank espresso spent about $18 and the others, who drank decaffeinated drinks, spent just half that amount, according to a Wall Street Journal report on the study.

"There have been a lot of studies on the effect of caffeine, but none really looking at how it affects consumer spending," Dipayan Biswas, a professor of marketing at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and an author of the study, told the WSJ.