27 Jedi-Level Mind Tricks Used By Major Retailers

Everybody needs to buy stuff, that's a fact of life. Whether you're visiting stores or shopping online or some app-based hybrid of both, you're going to spend money to get things you need. Which makes it all the more weird that retailers are doubling down and using every trick in the book to get you to buy more stuff, and spend more money, than you want to.

You don't except to walk into Best Buy and have them say “these aren't the droids you're looking for,” because Best Buy essentially sells droids—the keep we're looking for. You don't walk into a gas station and say “you don't want to sell me death sticks, you want to go home and rethink your life” because 1) you do want to buy death sticks and 2) the clerk always goes home to rethink their life. And major corporations capitalize on these trends.

Again, you were already going to buy the things. And yet sellers still feel compelled to trot out sneaky tricks like: