I already knew it’s going to be a dangerous half-day as she is the kind of person who can look around for hours (online and offline). We started with the usual suspects around her living area on-foot at John Lewis, H&M, Primark, Gap and Marks and Spencer, just to mention a few. She mostly looks around picks up some items from the discounted shelves, throwing in the basket and walks to the next checkpoint. At least that’s how she did it so far.

Something was different this time though. The last similar trip with her ended up with shopping bags of unwanted stuff to carry around the whole day mostly influenced by 30–40–50–60–70% discounts. This time NOTHING. She was picking up the pieces (clothing, bags, etc.) and after she was holding them in the basket for like 10 minutes, she returned them to the shelves every single one of them before we left the shop. In-between of two entrances I asked her:

“Why do you put things in the basket if you return them all? You don’t like them?”, and the answer was: “I don’t need more things to buy, I just want to own them a little (for that 10 mins), and then I can bring it back, that’s enough, it feels like checking out”.

After this answer, well I was a bit surprised and I decided to dig deeper 🤓 of the background of the cause and why this could work for her (after several failures from my side telling her that sales % is truly only a marketer’s tool, like an inception).