The Interpersonal Utility of Shopping: Confirmatory Study and Implications

The first stage of this project was an observational study conducted 2 years ago at an upscale shopping mall in Guadalajara, Mexico, with the aim of exploring group shopping using a simple measure of consumption (González et al. 2013). Individuals and groups of shoppers were observed as they came out of major stores in the mall. Researchers counted the number of bags carried by individual or group, as well as the number of people in the group and observable demographics (e.g., gender, age range, family group). A u-shaped relationship between number of bags and group size results after controlling for those observables. This increase in shopping utility past a critical group size of three shoppers was called “social lift.”