Price beats planet: why shoppers keep buying ultra-fast fashion despite knowing the harm

Millions of shoppers are fully aware that ultra-fast fashion carries a heavy environmental cost, yet they keep filling their online carts anyway. That is the central finding of new research from RMIT University, published in the Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, which suggests that environmental awareness alone is a surprisingly weak brake on consumption. According to the study, price and convenience consistently outrank sustainability concerns when shoppers decide whether to buy cheap, rapidly produced clothing, even among consumers who can articulate those concerns in detail. The finding arrives at a moment when the ultra-fast fashion sector is expanding at remarkable speed in Australia, raising urgent questions for policymakers, retailers and sustainability advocates about what actually drives consumer behaviour in the digital shopping era.

The timing of the research is significant. A Roy Morgan survey revealed that the leading fast fashion retailers Temu and Shein picked up an extra 1.5 million Australian customers between them last year. In the year to June 2025, 4.7 million Australians bought from Temu and 2.6 million from Shein, figures that underline how deeply these platforms have embedded themselves in everyday consumption. Ultra-fast fashion describes a business model that compresses the traditional fashion cycle even further than fast fashion, using online platforms, algorithmic recommendations and rapid manufacturing to move new designs from concept to consumer in a matter of days. The environmental implications are considerable, spanning textile waste, carbon emissions, water use and microplastic pollution, and most shoppers surveyed in the study demonstrated genuine familiarity with these issues.

Yet the RMIT researchers, co-authors Associate Professor Carol Tan and Associate Professor Saniyat Islam, alongside co-author Finela Quiambao, found that knowledge did not translate into restraint. Tan stressed that ultra-fast-fashion shopping should not be dismissed as simply thoughtless or impulsive, a framing that has often dominated public discussion of the phenomenon. Instead, participants in the study weighed sustainability against price and convenience, then used budgets and careful planning to make their eventual choices feel more acceptable. This distinction matters, because interventions built on the assumption that shoppers are merely careless are unlikely to succeed against consumers who are, in fact, calculating and deliberate, even when their calculations ultimately favour the cheap option.

The study identified two psychological patterns that help explain the apparent contradiction between what shoppers know and what they do. The first is termed strategic spontaneity. This describes how shoppers prepared for purchases in organised, methodical ways, building wish-lists, parking items in online carts, monitoring discounts and waiting for payday, while still experiencing the eventual purchase as spontaneous. The planning happens behind the scenes, but the moment of buying feels like an impulse, and that feeling appears to matter psychologically. One participant captured the dynamic plainly, saying they add things to their cart and wait for payday or a discount notification. The researchers argue that this reframing invites a fundamentally different understanding of the decision-making that sits behind ultra-fast-fashion purchases, one that acknowledges deliberate preparation rather than pure impulsivity.

Social media emerged as a powerful accelerant within this pattern. Participants described platforms such as TikTok as key influences, exposing them to trends and collapsing the distance between discovering an item and buying it. One participant recalled scrolling through TikTok, seeing someone styling a Shein haul, and having the same three items in their cart ten minutes later. The platforms themselves reinforce this loop through their architecture: what participants clicked on, searched for and saved shaped the recommendations and promotions they saw next, which in turn kept them engaged with the apps and primed for further purchases. In technical terms, the digital retail environment functions as a continuous stimulus system, feeding personalised cues to consumers at the exact moments they are most receptive, and shortening the deliberation window in which sustainability concerns might otherwise take hold.

The second psychological pattern the researchers named is cognitive buffering. This refers to the personal rules, limits and rationalisations shoppers constructed to feel more comfortable going ahead with a purchase despite their environmental misgivings. Budgets, spending caps and mental exceptions allowed participants to reconcile their values with their behaviour. One participant described the mechanism directly, acknowledging that ultra-fast fashion is bad for the planet but explaining that when they are on a budget and need an outfit for Saturday, they simply block that concern out. Islam noted that participants were often aware of the environmental impact of their purchases, but this awareness did not necessarily change behaviour; instead, the buffering strategies kept the discomfort at a manageable level. Cognitive buffering, in this sense, operates as a psychological pressure valve, allowing consumers to maintain a positive self-image while continuing to buy.

The research drew on interviews with 20 Australian millennials and was designed to provide deep insight into their purchasing decisions rather than to determine how common these behaviours are across the wider population. That methodological choice reflects the study’s aims: by examining the reasoning, planning and self-justification of individual shoppers in detail, the researchers could map the internal processes that broader surveys miss. The work extends the well-known stimulus-organism-response framework in consumer research through the lens of dual-process theory, which distinguishes between fast, intuitive thinking and slower, deliberative reasoning. The findings suggest that ultra-fast-fashion consumption is neither purely intuitive nor purely deliberative, but a hybrid in which deliberate planning and spontaneous-feeling purchase moments intertwine, with rationalisation bridging the gap between knowledge and action.

The practical implications are substantial. Tan argued that simply raising awareness of ultra-fast fashion’s environmental impact may not be enough to change behaviour, because many participants already understood the environmental concerns while affordability, convenience and the desire for something new still took priority. If sustainability advocates and policymakers want to encourage more sustainable choices, she said, they need to understand not only what consumers know but how they make purchases feel acceptable despite that knowledge. Messages that focus purely on ecological harm may therefore bounce off consumers who have already developed sophisticated buffering strategies for absorbing exactly that kind of information. The researchers suggest sustainability messaging could be more effective if it spoke to shoppers’ immediate priorities, including affordability and value for money, rather than treating environmental concern as the sole lever of change.

One concrete example the researchers highlight is showing a garment’s cost per wear. Presenting clothing in terms of long-term value could help consumers compare durable items with cheaper pieces that may be worn only a few times, reframing sustainability in the language of personal economics rather than moral obligation. Given the scale of the platform-driven boom documented in the Roy Morgan survey, with millions of Australians newly shopping on Temu and Shein in a single year, the stakes of getting these interventions right are high. The study, titled on strategic spontaneity and cognitive buffering in ultra-fast fashion consumption, offers a technically grounded account of why awareness campaigns alone have struggled to shift behaviour, and points toward strategies that work with, rather than against, the psychological realities of the modern digital shopper. As ultra-fast fashion platforms continue to grow, understanding the planning, the buffering and the manufactured spontaneity behind every click may prove essential to any serious attempt to slow the sector’s environmental toll.

Subject of Research: Consumer psychology of ultra-fast fashion purchasing behaviour and sustainability awareness

Article Title: Shoppers know fast fashion harms environment but keep buying: study

Article References: Shoppers know fast fashion harms environment but keep buying: study. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ultra-fast fashion, Temu, Shein, consumer behaviour, sustainability, strategic spontaneity, cognitive buffering, RMIT University, dual-process theory, social media shopping, environmental awareness, millennials