Shopping During the Week? Background Music May Get You to Spend More

Does background music encourage customers to buy more goods? Perhaps, but it depends on what day it is.

In a study based on three supermarkets in Sweden, researchers showed that background music did boost customer spending—but only Monday through Thursday.

The researchers looked at three supermarkets in Stockholm serving in total about 150,000 customers over three weeks, during which the stores switched between playing popular songs or elevator music in the background, or playing no music at all.

The type of music didn’t make a difference on purchases. But Monday through Thursday, music encouraged customers to spend more. In a follow-up experiment, the authors found that in one of those stores on weekdays, customers spent an average $23.31 per person for each excursion, compared with $14.96 when no music was playing.

On the weekends, however, the difference between having background music and no music wasn’t statistically significant.

Depleted customers

What explains the differences in shoppers’ behavior?

“On the weekdays, people tend to be more mentally and physically depleted,” says co-author Carl-Philip Ahlbom, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath’s School of Management in England. In such a state, he explains, shoppers tend to use intuitive processing, rather than active reasoning, making them more receptive to the relaxing effects of music. The music causes them to linger longer in the store, look more, and ultimately buy more items, he says.

To further test how music might affect the shopping experience, Ahlbom and his colleagues asked 600 people in the U.S. to imagine several activities that happen either on the weekend or weekday and how they felt during this activity. Then the participants were asked to specifically think about grocery shopping either on a weekday or weekend. Participants were shown an image of a shopping cart and then asked to select any item they would like to purchase from a list of 24 items. While selecting items, one-half of the participants heard music and one-half did not.

Effects of music

Afterward, the authors asked participants to rate, on a scale of one to seven, with one being “do not agree at all” and seven being “completely agree,” if they felt mentally tired, mentally worn out, stressed, anxious, happy, satisfied and excited. With seven reflecting the more positive feelings, participants who heard music on the weekdays scored 4.31 while participants who heard no music on the weekdays scored 3.96.

That is a statistically significant difference of 8.8%, says Ahlbom. There was no significant statistical difference for the two participant groups—those hearing and those not hearing music—while shopping on the weekends.

The idea, says Ahlbom, is that music makes people feel better when they are depleted and often encourages them to continue shopping. But when people are already relaxed, as they tend to be on the weekend, music has much less of an effect. “They don’t need to take the mental shortcut.”