Treatonomics: The Psychology Behind Our Small Splurges

This month, the city of Lyon, France, was in the middle of an unbearable heatwave. Instead of taking a vacation, I was home alone with my daughter as my husband started a new job that required him to be in the office every day, with no remote work possible for the first two months. This meant that we were not going anywhere this summer, not even to my in-laws’ house in the French countryside. We had also forgotten to sign our daughter up for daycare in August, so I ended up parenting full-time, with no chance to work on the research I usually manage to squeeze into the summer (those of you in academia will immediately recognize the terror). The month had been tight after a stretch of bills landed all at once, and I had spent the entire weekend building an elaborate budgeting spreadsheet, feeling genuinely proud of how organized I had managed to be.

Then I got it into my head that I urgently needed to go to the shopping mall and buy a Furby. Don't ask me why a Furby and not something else; my daughter did not ask for one and does not need one, but I became obsessed with the idea of buying it for myself.

As usual, I started researching where this obsession came from, and it turns out there is a marketing term for it. It is called treatonomics, a consumer trend of spending on small, affordable pleasures during moments of stress or when the broader picture looks uncertain. Apparently, people who are cutting back on vacations and big purchases are, at the same time, holding tightly to their coffees, pastries, cosmetics, and a million other little things that promise a moment of happiness. Recent survey data suggests that most Americans indulge in at least one of these small treats every month, and a majority intentionally cap the spending to keep the guilt at bay.

An Old Idea in a New Economy

Treatonomics is the latest expression of a phenomenon researchers have studied since the early 2000s, when Leonard Lauder, then chairman of Estée Lauder, noticed that lipstick sales seemed to rise during economic downturns. He called it the Lipstick Index, which later became associated with the broader lipstick effect. Since then, researchers have found evidence for this pattern in both real-world spending and experiments. Economists MacDonald and Dildar found that younger women spent more on cosmetics during the Great Recession even as their clothing spending fell. Psychology researcher Sarah Hill and her colleagues found that simply exposing women to recession cues increased their desire for appearance-enhancing products. Netchaeva and Rees found that women facing greater economic concern were especially likely to prioritize improving their professional appearance, suggesting that appearance-enhancing consumption can serve a strategic purpose when money feels less secure.

While research on the lipstick effect has focused largely on women and appearance-related spending, one welcome thing about treatonomics is that it broadens the lens to all of us, and rightfully so. The small comforts we reach for when money feels tight are hardly an exclusively female phenomenon.

The Psychology of the Small Repair

I wasn’t in any way surprised by my sudden Furby fixation, or by the idea that buying it might make me feel better. In fact, I have written about retail therapy before. Still, the paradox was quite funny. Despite having just spent an entire weekend cutting expenses, somehow this small, unnecessary purchase felt perfectly defensible. And now I had science to back it up, as research by marketing scholars Selin Atalay and Margaret Meloy found that people in a bad mood often turn to small, unplanned treats, and that these treats can genuinely and lastingly improve mood without producing the regret we might expect.

When the big things feel out of reach, a small purchase offers an immediate, manageable, tiny decision that is still ours to make. Buying a Furby did not solve my childcare gap or cool down the apartment, but for one afternoon it gave me back a sense of control, and who am I to judge?

Where This Leaves Us

My little Furby story might seem like an invitation to indulge in small treats, but please don’t take my words uncritically or through rose-tinted glasses. The mood benefits of these little treats can easily drift from an occasional reset into something closer to compulsion, especially when marketers design products and promotion efforts that specifically exploit the impulse. Occasional, deliberate indulgence is one of the more human ways we get through a hard season, and there is a whole industry built around it. Still, perhaps the important word here is deliberate. Self-control means knowing when you are choosing the treat and when the treat has, in some sense, been chosen for you. Buy the Furby if you want the Furby. But don’t let marketers make you become a sheep in the treatonomics flock.

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