ACADEMIC PAPERS Thrift shopping: Combining utilitarian thrift and hedonic treat benefits Received in revised form. Fleura Bardhi is an assistant professor in the n:\arketing group at the College of Business Adnninistration, Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Her research interests fall in three domains: identity processes during life transitions, consumer relationships and consumer experiences. She has conducted research in the areas of commercial betrayal, thrift shopping and anchoring of identity in life transitions. Eric J. Amould is E. J. Faulkner College Professor of Agribusiness & Marketing and CBA Agribusiness Program Interim Director at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA. His recent research investigates consumer rituals, household consumption behaviour, postmodern motivation, magical consumption, service relationships. West African marketing channels and the uses of qualitative data. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Keywords: Thrift, etcinomic shopping, hedonic shopping, thrift shopping, ethnography Abstract Through an ethnography of shopping that takes place in five thrift stores in a US mldwestern town, the authors examine the role of thrift in a shopping process that is both economic and hedonic—'thrift shopping'. Taking a dialectical perspective on the study of shopping (Sherry, 1990), Miller's (1998) findings on the roie of thrift are extended by showing that in the thrift shopping context thrift coexists with treat, and the pursuit of thrift can itself become a hedonic experience. In addition, the authors identify six ways in which consumers practise thrift in thrift shopping and the hedonic benefits that they derive from this money-saving actiinty. The findings challenge the traditional frugality perspective of dichotomising thrift and hedonic desire being opposite and contradictory orientations. Copyright ((j 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Fleura Bardhi Northeastern University, College of Btjsiness Administration, 202 Hayden Hall, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA Te/.-+(617) 373 2812 fax;-(-(517) 373 8366 e-mail: f.bardhi© neu.edu INTRODUCTION In the Theory of Shopping, Miller (1998) identifies two values that consumers derive from everyday shopping: being thrifty (and, as a result, being moral) and expressing devotional love to significant others. This paper focuses on the first value identified by Miller (1998), namely thrift, and examines its role in the shopping process. One of the criticisms of Miller's (1998) shopping theory has been its failure to incorporate the marketing literature on shopping into this work (Arnould, 2000; Woodruffe-Burton et al., 2002). In this paper, one of these failures is addressed, namely Miller's dichotomous perspective of shopping orientations and the concept of thrift, by incorporating one marketing perspective of shopping as dialectical (Ealk and Campbell, 1997; Sherry, 1990). While Miller adopted a dichotomous Journal of Consumer Behaviourvoi.4,4,223-233 copyright._ 2(K)5johnWiiey& Sons, Lid. 1472-0817 223