Alina Selyukh
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-17-2025 4PM EDT
Forever 21 grew massive in the early 2000s by making designer style fashion accessible, bringing runway styles to mall shoppers for cheap prices. This was the dawn of fast fashion. The chain expanded aggressively and over time struggled to compete with even faster, even cheaper online rivals. Companies like ASOS and Boohoo and now Shein and Temu shipping ultra-fast fashion from China.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-17-2025 4PM EDT
Forever 21 survived its first bankruptcy in 2019 as a smaller company with new owners. Now it's back on the auction block, losing money and shoppers, blaming online competition and high inflation, warning that this could be the end of the line. Forever liquidation. Alina Seluk, NPR News.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
It's more commercial. It's the field that advertisers have embraced. So companies use neuromarketing to get people to fall in love with their brand or to buy their stuff. So some researchers have split off into consumer neuroscience, presenting it as a less corporate field, if that makes sense. But they're definitely linked.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
It's not really that complicated as far as science goes, but it's all about the sense of urgency, scarcity, with a sprinkling of imaginative anticipation and FOMO, really.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I'm here to tell you about how you process a sale, how stores push your buttons, and how to outsmart them.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I mean, this is kind of the perfect recipe for the stores of that mall. You know, they are thrilled when people like us come in without a plan, with no list, with no budget. It's kind of ideal for them. Right. Because here's what happens when you shop. In your brain, there's a constant push and pull between what can be described as the emotional and the rational parts.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
We're going to look for sales, right? We're going to look for sales and we're going to talk about how sales make us feel. All right, let's do it. Where are we going to go shopping?
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
That's Carolyn Yoon, who's one of the top experts on consumer neuroscience. She's a professor of marketing at the Michigan Ross School of Business.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
All right, are you ready? I'm so ready. Wait, wait, don't look, don't look. How do you feel right now? I feel okay. Okay, now look at the sale. Buy three, get three free. Clearance for $2. I feel like they have that every day. Everything is so sparkly. Sparkly and shiny. Butterfly! They're jingle bells.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I like how we said it's the magnet for teens and tweens, but I am the one losing my mind over the sparkly things. Yeah, we touched everything. We really did. Okay, so back to how sales work in your brain. So anticipation plays a huge role in getting you to buy stuff.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
When you spot something that you like, for example, you might start to imagine yourself having a great new life in which you have jingle bell earrings. Even more so if there's a pleasant memory involved, like if you've had jingle bell earrings before and you are already predisposed to liking them.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Our neural processes are super fast, so a lot starts running through your brain kind of at the same time, including the counterbalance to the reward system, which is the cognitive mechanism, like your prudent little accountant.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
That was definitely me shopping under stress. We're living on the edge. But so far, process-wise, pretty straightforward, right? We see something we like, we get excited, then we go, whoa, that's expensive. It's like a mental scale with the dopamine-fueled reward mechanism motivating you on one side and the internal accountant on the other side in your frontal cortex.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
If teenage Alina knew that you can get paid for knowing stuff about the malls, she'd be really impressed. I cover retail, so I have to shop for science.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Now, guess what happens when you add a sale to the mix? The accountant freaks out. Yes, a sale is like the thumb that tips your mental scale toward buying. Jorge Barraza, who is a consumer psychologist at the University of Southern California, says that just finding a sale, just seeing it, actually registers often as a win already. Of course. It's like delivering its own bolt of joy.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Yeah. And we were on Zoom and you could just see physically how much he hated that whole line of questioning.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
So no lizard brain. Forget it. Our brains are too complex for these basic metaphors.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
And sales create a sense of urgency and a sense of scarcity. And these are the two building blocks of impulse shopping.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Today only everyone is here and they're buying that one thing that you want. Stores also use all kinds of tricks to sway your internal accountant toward buying. For example, there's decoy pricing. Like picture a store shelf where you have two bags of, let's say, candy. One is smaller and one's larger. How do you get people to buy the bigger bag of the two?
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
You add a decoy third option, and that's a medium bag that's much smaller than the largest bag, but only slightly cheaper.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Exactly. Even though it's getting people to buy, the most expensive option there is on the shelf. Well, I've been that sucker. Everyone has. I've fallen for it. Another classic trick is the suggested price. And that's like when I went shopping recently for a coat and its price was like $80, but the tag on it said the suggested or original price was $150.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I have no idea if the coat really ever was $150, but I felt like, what a nice coat for such a steal.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Yes. And Jorge Barraza says that we put a lot of meaning into that original higher price that we might see on a tag. We actually not only perceive expensive things as higher quality... He says we actually experience them as higher quality.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Yes. And this is the peak holiday shopping season. There is one question that I always get around this time. You can probably guess what it is. I think I can. Are holiday discounts actually a good deal? That's exactly it. Bingo. And that is really subjective. Honestly, sales can be good. They really can. And it really depends on your budget. It depends on how badly you need whatever this item is.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
And I kept asking the experts like what their trick was to approach discounts rationally. OK. And they were like, who says we do that? We all fall for sales just the same. Oh, my gosh, no. So they didn't offer, like, any tips. I didn't say that. They did have tips. They just said that no one is capable of completely rationally approaching it.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
But so, okay, one strategy they offered is maybe obvious, hard to do, but it's to make a shopping list in advance and then stick to it. Just don't get distracted by the sales. Okay, the thing that I didn't do at all. That's the first one. So then another one is to research stuff so you know if the sale really is a good price. You can do it in advance or you can do it on the spot from your phone.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
But the main piece of advice is also the hardest one to do, I feel like, which is give yourself time to cool off from that instant reaction to a sale. So like give your internal accountant like a moment to process. Because remember, we feel first and think later. It happens fast. Nonetheless, if you can avoid the rush, do it.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Yeah, we didn't do this third tip. Actually, we didn't do any of these tips. Yeah. But slowing down was really hard to do because there was just so much stuff there.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Too many choices. And you have to make them now because it's buy three, get three free, or otherwise you're only going to get the three original ones.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Thank you. So you got a headband and two clips for free, but you spent $40. Yeah. I feel kind of... I don't know.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Or do you even need this item, right? And none of this is science, to be clear. But there is a field of study called consumer neuroscience. And it has a slightly more controversial sibling or maybe cousin called neuromarketing. Oh, OK. And they both study what happens in your brain when you're making purchasing decisions or just generally wearing the shoes of a consumer.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
Yes, coffee prices have soared. And it all started with problems with harvests, first in Vietnam and then in Brazil. These are the two top growers of the most common types of coffee beans. And the culprit was abnormal weather, which many in the industry attribute to climate change. I talked to some longtime importers of green coffee, that's raw beans.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
One of them is John Cassette from Royal Coffee in California. And he says, first you had Vietnam with a serious drought, followed by heavier rains than usual. And that drove up prices for the bean that grows there. And already had people scrambling to switch to the bean that grows in Brazil. And then Brazil had one of the worst droughts on record. Here's Cassette.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
Eventually it did rain, but farmers later said a lot of the damage was irreversible. And so the price of the most common coffee, that's called Arabica, jumped 70 percent this year. The price of the other type of coffee called Robusta at one point doubled in price. Both cost more than they ever did. Arabica and Robusta. How different are these?
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
Yeah, so they have different flavor based on where they grow. What I have here in my cup is Arabica. It is the most common. Brazil is the biggest grower. And this coffee grows at higher altitudes. It has a softer, sweeter taste. And that's what you find often in your roast coffee, your ground coffee. Robusta grows at lower elevation. Vietnam is the biggest grower.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
And this bean has a harsher, more bitter taste. It's used a lot for instant coffee.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
You know, coffee markets are complicated, like all commodities. Many of the traders actually need the physical coffee, the bags of beans. But many traders are just financial speculators. They're trying to game the price change, you know, buy cheaper, sell higher. And everyone bets on how much they think beans will cost in the future.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
And so when people think those beans won't grow or there won't be enough, those who need those beans scramble, speculators go nuts, and it all only spirals the price further, which is what's happened. And it doesn't help that this week one of the world's biggest coffee traders made a forecast that Arabica—coffee like I have here— could see supply decline by nearly a quarter in the next cycle.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
So I'm sorry to say those prices have already been rising. If you shop at the supermarket, brands like Nescafe, Maxwell House, Folgers, Dunkin', they've all had waves of price increases. They've cited higher cost of the green raw coffee. At your local coffee shop, it really depends. Depends on how they source their products.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
But yes, likely they're feeling the pressure to raise prices and they're just trying to assess how to do that without scaring away shoppers. But fact of the matter is, as a world, we are drinking more and more and more coffee. So demand has not waned so far. People so far have been willing to pay those higher prices for their coffee habit. The markets will probably eventually calm down.
Up First from NPR
S. Korea President, Texas Abortion Lawsuit, Coffee Prices
Importers I talked to pointed out historically adjusted for inflation. We've actually been paying pretty low prices for a pound of coffee. So maybe it's the days of cheap coffee that are over.