The Rich Would Rather Shop Retail
Over the last few years, many of us have become totally addicted to online shopping. Why waste time and gas going from mall to mall when you can compare products, search for the lowest price and place an order from your laptop or smartphone? Still, there is one group that prefers the retail experience—the ultra wealthy.
The Luxury Institute recently surveyed a group of 1,600 people who earn a minimum of $150,000 per year and have an average net worth of $2.9 million to ascertain their buying habits. According to this survey, wealthy shoppers do not do research on potential purchases before deciding what to buy. Instead, they prefer the actual shopping experience, complete with walking around stores, handling merchandise and interacting with other shoppers.
Luxury Institute chief executive Milton Pedraza explained why these findings are opposed to the current beliefs about shoppers: “Luxury experts and luxury executives have bought into the myth that, whether it is millennials or men or women, they’ve done so much research on the Internet that they can no longer be influenced in the store.”
The study found that for the superrich, the opposite was true. “For instance, when buying jewelry, nearly half of women don’t do any research whatsoever before heading to the store, preferring to gaze at all the shiny baubles in glass cases and make their decisions on the spot,” said Pedraza.
“This number’s even higher when it comes to fashion accessories, with 60% of women opting to forgo online research before snagging a pricey handbag.”
The research did uncover two major exceptions: men who are buying watches and women who are purchasing beauty products. The latter can be partially explained by brand loyalty, since a woman who has been buying cosmetics by Clinique, MAC or Chanel for years is likely to stick to her favorite label.
As for the guys, Pedraza had this to say: “That’s because buyers of expensive watches are often aficionados wholly familiar with the world of fancy timepieces.”
See there, fanciers of luxury watches! You really are savvy shoppers!
