How credit card payments increase unhealthy food purchases: visceral regulation of vices

Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit im-pulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently, consumers are more likely to buy unhealthy food products when they pay by credit card than when they pay in cash. Results from four studies support these hypotheses. Analysis of actual shopping behavior of 1,000 households over a period of 6 months revealed that shopping baskets have a larger proportion of food items rated as impulsive and unhealthy when shoppers use credit or debit cards to pay for the purchases (study 1). Follow-up experiments (studies 2–4) show that the vice-regulation effect of cash payments is mediated by pain of payment and moderated by chronic sensitivity to pain of payment. Implications for consumer welfare and theories of impulsive con-sumption are discussed. The past two decades have witnessed a rapid increasein obesity among U.S. consumers. According to the Center for Disease Control, 34 % of U.S. adults are obese, up from 23 % in 1988. An additional 33 % are overweight (Ogden et al. 2006). These results suggest that the con-sumption of unhealthy food is increasing and have prompted Manoj Thomas is assistant professor of marketing at Cornell University