Cart Abandonment Issues: A Field Guide to the 7 Species of Black Friday Online Shopper
Photo: Гамлет Маркарян, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Black Friday is November 27 this year, which means America is roughly twelve days from its annual migration into the browser tabs. And as any veteran of the holiday shopping wars can tell you, the sales aren't the interesting part. The shoppers are.
Because something happens to a normally reasonable adult when a price gets a red slash through it. Behavioral scientists have fancy names for it. We prefer 'deal brain,' the temporary neurological event in which a person genuinely believes they need a second air fryer.
Below, our deeply unscientific taxonomy of the seven species you'll encounter this month — possibly in the mirror.
1. The Cart Abandoner
The Cart Abandoner adds eleven items across four retailers and purchases none of them. Their cart is a mood board of ambition. Their cart is a diary. Their cart is, if we're honest, a form of therapy that costs nothing.
Tell-tale sign: a shopping cart from a past season still sitting there, memorialized, the digital equivalent of a gym membership card in a drawer.
2. The Spreadsheet Vigilante
This shopper maintains a color-coded document with columns for price history, coupon stacking, cash-back rates, and 'spouse approval status.' They do not enjoy shopping. They enjoy winning.
The Spreadsheet Vigilante has a strong opinion about whether the doorbuster is actually a deal or a repackaged October price, and they will share it, unprompted, in your group chat.
3. The 11:59 P.M. Refresh Gremlin
The Refresh Gremlin believes, against all evidence, that the real deals land in the final sixty seconds before the timer expires. They have built an entire personality around it.
Symptoms include: cold coffee, three devices open simultaneously, and a facial expression best described as 'crouching tiger, hidden anxiety.' They will refresh a page until it feels like a haunted house — a hallway of mirrors where the price keeps changing and the discount is always slightly out of reach.
4. The One-Item Purist
No list. No tabs. No spreadsheet. The Purist wakes up knowing they want exactly one thing and emerges from the internet eleven minutes later having bought it, plus a screen protector nobody asked for.
We respect the Purist. We also suspect they're not entirely human.
5. The Tab Hoarder
Forty-one tabs. All of them a size medium in a color called 'glacier.' The Tab Hoarder's browser looks like the desk of a detective who has gone rogue.
Their cart history is a museum of near-misses and one deeply regrettable lamp. Ask them how many items they'll actually buy and they will say 'a few,' which is exactly what they said last year.
6. The Price History Archaeologist
This one does not buy. This one excavates. The Archaeologist pulls up three years of price tracking data to determine that the item is, in fact, eleven dollars cheaper than in March, and then keeps digging anyway.
They operate on a simple principle: never pay a number that hasn't been verified by a chart. The checkout page, to them, is a distrustful witness.
7. The Morning-After Returner
Peak deal brain arrives at 2 a.m., when the Morning-After Returner purchases a weighted blanket, a mushroom-growing kit, and a set of steak knives. By 9 a.m., they are reading the return policy with the haunted expression of someone who has met themselves for the first time.
Their cart history, if subpoenaed, would read like a confession.
What Your Cart Says About You
We submit that the cart is the most honest document a person produces all year. It records not who you are, but who you briefly believed you could be — the person who cooks, gardens, brews their own kombucha, and owns four proper serving platters.
The checkout page, meanwhile, remains the most haunted room on the internet. Tax appears from nowhere. Shipping reveals itself at the last step. A popup offers a fifth opportunity to join a rewards program. You are asked, one final time, whether you are sure.
You are never sure. That's the whole point.
So go ahead. Build the spreadsheet. Hoard the tabs. Refresh at 11:59. Just remember that the item will arrive in a cardboard box, and the box will be the most exciting part.
Happy deal hunting. Watch your budget. Check the return window.
