Bankruptcy

Credit Cards Make You Fat

By Katie Porter

I know, I know, I am willing to say anything in my blog title to get you to read my post (see here for an oldie but a goodie). In my recently read pile is How Credit Card Payments Increase Unhealthy Food Purchases: Visceral Regulation of Vices by Manoj Thomas, Kalpeseh Kaushik Desai, and Satheeshkumar Seenivasan, which points to an association between what types of foods consumers purchase and how they pay at check-out.  The authors' basic hypothesis is that paying in cash is painful, or at least more salient, than credit or debit cards, which they characterize as "less vivid and emotionally more inert modes of payment." They do several studies but the first one uses data from actual shopping behaviors of 1,000 households over six months. The authors find  that these households buy a higher proportion of food rated as impulsive or unhealthy when they use credit or debit cards to pay for the purchases. They stress that the mode of payment did not affect the number of virtue products (such as vegetables) purchased. Another nugget of knowledge about consumer behavior; will we start seeing weight loss programs advise members to carry cash?

Full post as published by Credit Slips on December 01, 2010 (boomark / email).