There are so many reasons why you may regret the purchase you just made --- you don’t need it. You already have it. You were persuaded to buy too much of it simply because the price seemed irresistible. You bought something and now you simply hate it. That regret? That is buyer's remorse – and we've all experienced it.
…At the time. Some of us regret our purchases immediately. Some of us regret them a little later. For instance, I bought dinner plates online recently; only to remember that I already had two similar sets at home that I had received as gifts. BTW, it was a no-free-returns deal. Instant buyer's remorse!
Perhaps those beautiful, expensive shoes looked great in the store. You bring them home and you find that there will be few, if any occasions for which you will be able to actually wear them.
Sometimes you can’t wait – to buy that new phone, computer or gadget. And then you wish you had!
This is buyer’s remorse of a different level – you buy something and then find that your friend bought the same thing for a fraction of the price – because it went on sale the day after you bought it!
Don’t really need it. You're not sure you even like it much. But the price was right and you bought it. Now you regret it – so much. Textbook buyer's remorse!
The ‘festive sales’, ‘end of season sales’, ‘clearance sales’ simply call out to us don’t they! We are convinced that never again in our entire lives shall we find deals as good as these! We buy and then we buy some more. In the end we are left with a huge bill and very little idea how that happened.
You think you got a good deal when you went for that buy-one-get-one-free offer. You didn’t. They simply succeeded in making you buy two instead of one. You understand clever marketing and realise you’ve been played. That's buyers' remorse too.
I’ll just click on this Facebook ad. I’ll just take a look. I’ll just add this to my cart for later. You know how it goes – soon you’ve bought stuff you never meant to... weak and sad!
It looks interesting. It looks like you may need it --- sometime in the dim and distant future. You buy it. But right now, you have no idea what to do with it. You don’t even know where to put the damn thing; ergo buyer's remorse.
Buyer’s remorse usually starts with some sort of rationalisation: this is too good a deal, I need it, someone else may need it, I simply love it, it will be useful as a gift. You know how it goes. Before you know it, you’ve bought a bunch of stuff and you really don’t know how the bill got that big.
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