Here are some of the impulse purchases I made on Amazon in the last 18 months: compression socks ($18). An All-Clad stainless steel saute pan, with lid ($99). A Petzl headlamp – a headlamp! – in orange ($27). And a thing that chops the head off your egg ($25), which I ordered, I'm ashamed to say, after seeing Christopher Kimball use one on PBS's America's Test Kitchen. Some of these things I bought as gifts for friends, but still: with the exception of the pan, what a depressingly useless inventory.
Needless to say, nobody actually needed any of these items. But because my credit-card information is preloaded on Amazon.com, I gave barely a thought to the reality that ordering them involved the exchange of actual money. Of the many reasons for the success of online retail, this is, surely, the most compelling: that until your credit-card statement drops into your inbox, one-click buying feels free.
Until now, this psychology applied mostly to lower-rent items, the kinds of things that you might, if you must, still be persuaded to buy at the cash register in a supermarket. But that is changing. This week, Sotheby's, the art dealer, announced that it will work in collaboration with eBay to put some of its auctions online and, eventually, to allow high-rolling investors to buy art with the same ease that you or I might buy an egg guillotine.
The efforts by Sotheby's to enlarge its customer base beyond a rarefied 100,000 or so regular buyers is many years behind the Amazon model, but you can see where it is going: if you don't mind buying something from a live stream rather than an auction house, you are potentially two expensive clicks and an impulse away from owning that classical Chinese silk hanging scroll (September 18 auction, reserve price $500,000 - $700,000).
Before the Sotheby's deal, eBay had already expanded its business to cover high-end products – if you want a laugh, browse the site's Lamborghini page. And the boom in mobile payments is predicted to reach $6.2bn this year, a faster growing industry than internet banking.
The race is now on for easier apps to facilitate the transactions, giving rise to money changing services that effectively turn your phone into a mobile ATM. From Apple's fingerprinted Touch ID and Google Wallet to apps such as Square, Venmo and Isis – currently undergoing a strenuous rebranding effort to distance itself from the jihadist group of the same name – the future of immaterial money makes even Paypal look lumbering.
High or low, the last shred of discomfort about buying online – buying, that is, with no physical currency, even a piece of plastic – has disappeared. Previous iterations of the post-cash initiative failed – Sotheby's and Amazon tried an earlier partnership that collapsed within a year, probably due to consumer anxiety about online shopping – but not even six years since the global credit crisis, and what little caution remains must now withstand the temptations of the weightless spend.
It is easy, in the face of all this, to get sucked into a bout of where-will-it-end doom-mongering, and you do wonder where it will all end. Anything that encourages reckless spending is a bad thing, and although new banking technology has always caused consumer anxiety – the popularization of credit cards in the 1970s was greeted with hand-wringing of exactly this kind – we do seem to be reaching an event horizon.
If ordering stuff gets any easier, merely having the thought "buy it, buy it" will execute the purchase and, 24 hours later, the breadmaker you are destined to use exactly once will be right there, on your doorstep – possibly having arrived by drone.
The thing is, many of the pioneers in mobile payments are actually rather conservative. Starbucks allows you to pay for your coffee by swiping a barcode on your phone – but the app is prepaid. You simply cannot go into debt by giving in to that croissant every morning (even though you had breakfast at home). But the coffee company will, like other retail giants that crave your data, track your movements through your payment history, and spam you with extra marketing if you leave behind personal information like your zip code.
Still, the psychology of shopping has always revolved around more than convenience. If you have ever been to a live auction, you'll know that a part of the losing-your-head aspect comes from the atmosphere in the room: if you get into a bidding war with someone you decide is hateful, you're well on your way out to sea.
Example: I once attended a furniture auction in north London for the sole purpose of preventing a friend from bidding higher than £300 on a kitchen table. She got into a stand-off with a disagreeable looking dealer and wound up paying over £600 for it.
"That was amazing!" we both said, high-fiving each other afterwards.
And then, the thought that always chases these moments of mindless expenditure: Oh.
