Planning to Make Unplanned Purchases? The Role of In-Store Slack in Budget Deviation

We propose that consumers have mental budgets for grocery trips that are typically composed of both an itemized portion and in-store slack. We conceptualize the itemized portion as the amount that the consumer has allocated to spend on items planned to the brand or product level and the in-store slack as the portion of the mental budget that is not assigned to be spent on any particular product but remains available for in-store decisions. Using...