Do you think that bad habits can sometimes actually be a good thing?  From picking your nose to having a nervous twitch; bad habits come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and movements.  Bad habits don’t have to be limited to physical movement and aren’t always necessarily bad.  Several experiences and occasions I have seen may help give bad habits related to economy a new name.

            Working at Hy-Vee this summer, a great instance of an economic bad habit actually being good for the economy  would usually occur several times each day.  A customer, frustrated and fatigued, unloads their cart; much like an airplane crew loads the baggage onto a plane before takeoff.

 “I only planned on buying these two items,” the customer would say,

“But I ended up with a cart full!”

This bad habit has been caught and named:  Compulsive Shopping Disorder (CSD).  In rare occasions, CSD becomes a truly bad habit, but overall, CSD may actually help a customer buy items and products they might’ve needed the rest of the week.  I saw the same customer a week later and she discussed with the cashier that she ended up needing most of the items she had purchased.

Another good economic bad habit occurs at the opposite side of the spectrum.  I have a bad habit of not buying anything unless I absolutely need it.  I consider it a bad habit because I’ve missed out on a lot of fun several times by not spending a little bit of money for anything from a ticket to a concert to some tickets to a Viking’s game.  Obviously, being too thrifty at times can help by having money saved up for rainy days, college, and many other things.

Lastly, good economic bad habits don’t always help the buyer, but the producer can benefit from them.  Several of my friends seem to buy energy drinks constantly.  A few dollars a day really adds up over time and probably has cut into their budgets at least a little.  The companies that make energy drinks, however, get profit from people like my friends and probably wouldn’t consider having an energy drink habit as bad.

Buying too many groceries, hardly purchasing anything at all, and having an addiction to energy drinks seem to be viewed as bad habits to many people.  On the economic scale, those examples can definitely appear as good habits depending on the occasion.  From those examples and personal experience, I think a good name for good bad habits related to the economy should be called “Good Economic Bad Habits”.