many brick-and-mortar retailers have regarded shoppers' smartphones as a distraction—or worse. They worried that customers who paid attention to their phones spent less time looking at enticing product displays in the store, or might use their phones to search for better deals online.
To find out if these fears were justified (specifically when people go grocery shopping) a team of researchers conducted an experiment. We placed special eye-tracking glasses on more than 400 shoppers, who then went about their shopping as usual.
The glasses allowed us to see precisely what the shoppers were doing when they were shopping—and what they looked at. Some of the participants were encouraged to use their mobile phones, while some were asked to put them away for the duration of their shopping trip.
It turned out that the effect is ultimately the opposite of what we might have thought. Shoppers who checked their phone while shopping spent on average 41 percent more at the till—and those people who used their phones the most also tended to spend the most money.
Inside a shoppers' mind
The reason for this lies in the way the human brain works when we are shopping—and the vast amount of choices on offer.
Even a small grocery store may keep 10,000 unique products in stock, while large supermarkets stock many times that. It is impossible for the human mind to consciously process and choose between all these available items. We simply cannot cope with all these decisions, which means our brains are trying to simplify the complexity of a grocery store in different ways.
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