Do you often find yourself struggling to find and buy a product with a suitable quality at the possibly lowest price: Consumer Behavior in Global and Digital World Assignment, RP, Singapore

Do you often find yourself struggling to find and buy a product with a suitable quality at the possibly lowest price? Hence your search and found yourself stumbling into the world of Dollar stores.

Or you probably already jumped into the Dollar Store bandwagon. From Daiso, and Value Dollar Store to Dollar Tree, you’ve heard it. Perhaps, you also often find yourself entering one, and leaving with a whole list of items
you never planned to buy.

That is the magic behind Dollar Stores, a highly successful market concept that attracts customers from all walks of life. Most dollar stores sell household items, stationaries, and frozen food until seasonal items come from under the same foreign brand or country.

With that, the factors of selling a diverse variety of items and a single, low price point can make consumer’s purchase decisions become more irrational, and impulsive yet still fulfilling to them. How so?

Dollar stores utilize low-involvement purchase decisions

Every product is perceived as a solution to a certain need. The decision to search and buy for a certain product happens because an individual needs a solution to fill in the gap between what they have and what they want (Kardes, Cline, and Cronley, 2011).

Different need gaps lead to different decisions depending on how the need wants to be solved and the nature of the person deciding (Szmign and Piacentini, 2015). This is where the level of involvement comes in. One must understand what the perceived relevance of the purchase to them is (Szmigin and Piacentini, 2015).

In a low-involvement decision-making process, less thought and information search is done before making a purchase. This could result in a more impulsive motive within a consumer. Such motive builds the habit of “random choice routine”, where we pick products that are simply cheap and aesthetic or functional, as long as it feeds our hedonistic need and gives us a feeling of self-gratification. To connect, dollar stores are the perfect go-to-market to look for innovative, low-cost, functional, or cute products.

Dollar stores’ ability to be seasonal and trendy allows them to have a quick product variety cycle. This quick product variety behavior allows consumers with variety-seeking behaviors to experiment with dollar store products like a new cute looking $1 portable stool or perhaps a $1 phone case (Szmigin and Piacentini, 2015). It is because they know that there is a low cost of disappointment as compensated through the cheap price of the product.