Buyers Remorse
My first job, developing a retail POS system, there was a database table that only had about eight records in it. It was called something like ReturnReason, and was a static lookup table containing, as it said on the tin, reasons why a customer was returning an item. The POS system’s users would be prompted to ask. From our perspective as customers, being asked to justify why we’re returning something feels somewhat invasive or accusatory, but it’s useful information for a retailer to have—perhaps a particular item is frequently returned because it’s found to be defective, for example.
One of the values in that lookup table always stuck out to me, as I’d never seen the phrase before: Buyers Remorse.
When you think about how ordinary a rectangle of metal and plastic is, it’s interesting to note how our feelings swing wildly around it. Before I bought an iPad, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d go to the Apple Store on my lunch break and play with them incessantly, longing for the day I could bring one home. When we went on a trip to Europe, I convinced my wife it would be better to lug an iPad around than a laptop, and she could process all the pictures she’d take on there. She was sold. I’d already been sold, for months.
It didn’t help that we were already spending so much to take this trip: within forty eight hours of buying the iPad, I was suggesting we give it back. Couldn’t those hundreds of dollars, I reasoned, be better spent elsewhere?
We didn’t give it back, at least partly because my wife is slightly less prone to wild mood swings about personal electronics, but in this same scenario many retailers would find themselves processing a return.
And the value they’d pick in the drop down for return reason: buyers remorse.
It’s worth asking why that value in the lookup table is needed. It’s worth asking because, as with so many other aspects of our lives, nothing changed in the world before and after the purchase—of the iPad, the evening gown, the iguana, whatever—except for us.
The iPad, while delightful, is still pretty mundane compared to falling in love with the local barista or being hit by a car. Why do we obsess about the things we buy, build them up until the reality can only possibly let us down?
Maybe what we’re really building in the months before we buy the new iPad, plasma TV, or Prius is not an objectively imagined model of tablet/TV/car ownership, but a fantasy about how our lives could be different and better. A fantasy in which our current discontent doesn’t exist, swept away somehow by the nebulous qualities we’re imposing on our soon-to-be-grasped new shiny thing.
As rational beings (we believe), we rationalize: we tell ourselves once we have a faster laptop we can finally really dig into developing that iPhone app on the side. The one we just know will be a hit and let us finally quit the damned day job—we never meant to stay there more than a couple years anyway, it’s funny how time gets away from you. But now! Now we’ll have the carefree life of the indie app developer, spending sunny summer days working in the coffee shop around the corner—the one where the barista of our dreams works—or maybe we’ll ride our bike all over town seeking shady spots to sit and work peacefully for an hour, and in doing so finally get in shape after all those years of shuffling into the office every day, exerting ourselves no harder than required to catch the bus.
We’ll be free, in the ways we’ve always dreamed of being free.
And then, a week after the MacBook Air arrives, sure it’s an elegant computer that’s fast and delightful to use, but… well, we’re still the same person, living the same life.
But we can hardly articulate to ourselves the real reason for our remorse. Surely, as rational beings, we never truly dedicated a little hopeful part of ourselves to that fanciful idea; that somehow buying a new widget would make everything different, solve all our problems, make us happy? That’s ridiculous, of course.
And yet.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery made this astute observation in The Google We Always Wanted:
“The tragedy of wishes is that, when you finally get what you want, you realize that you actually didn’t want that at all.”
That’s a good coda or what I’m talking about here: you actually wanted happiness. Or security. Freedom. Or change. But all you got was an ordinary rectangle.