Shoppers that remember to bring reusable shopping bags to the grocery store tend to be more environmentally minded, but they’re also more likely to treat themselves to junk food when they get there, according to new research.
Researchers have discovered that a customer’s choice of shopping bag influences purchasing.
While canvas or reusable bags are more likely to encourage shoppers to choose environmentally friendly organic products, they also make people feel more deserving of a sugary or fatty treat.
Study: shopping habits change when people bring their own bags to the grocery store https://t.co/wkk3mcczLh pic.twitter.com/VcjR02h0Y6
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 14, 2015
That’s the connection drawn by Uma Karmarkar and Bryan Bollinger at the business schools of Harvard and Duke when they analyzed the study: “BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself and the Environment.”
“Grocery store shoppers who bring their own bags are more likely to purchase organic produce and other healthy food. But those same shoppers often feel virtuous, because they are acting in an environmentally responsible way," Uma wrote in a statement.
"That feeling easily persuades them that, because they are being good to the environment, they should treat themselves to cookies or potato chips or some other product with lots of fat, salt, or sugar,” he added.
However, people with children were a little less likely to buy organic or junk, which the researchers attribute to balancing “their own purchasing preferences with competing motivations arising from their role as parents.”
The study is the first to demonstrate that bringing your own grocery bags causes significant changes in food purchasing behavior. They collected loyalty cardholder data from about 140,000 shopping trips at a grocery store in California in the mid-2000s.
Bringing a reusable bag to the grocery store is good for the planet. But it's bad for you: https://t.co/MqoCjpM0Ah pic.twitter.com/2rxyGTCNiL — SpeedReads (@SpeedReads) July 14, 2015
The researchers then compared the same shoppers on trips for which they brought their own bags with trips for which they did not.
"Our findings thus have important implications for grocery store managers," said Bollinger. "In stores where reusable bags are popular, marketing organic or sustainably farmed foods as indulgences could increase the sales of those items.”
This research was done in one state and in one grocery store, so this can’t be used as the general rule.
