Does One Bad Apple Spoil the Barrel? Carry-Over Effects of Buying Disgusting Products on Consumer Search and Shopping Basket Decisions

Abstract

Imagine two consumers in a supermarket: X needs to buy trash bags while Y needs to buy sandwich bags. Would you expect these consumers to behave differently during the remainder of the shopping trip? Using transactional data from the field and laboratory experiments we show that products, such as trash bags, that elicit feelings of disgust in consumers can alter how much consumers search among unrelated product categories, how much time they spend in the store as a whole, the types of products they buy, and their evaluations of the shopping experience