A closer look
Online retailers absolutely love offering you free shipping because behavioral economists have proven that consumers are fundamentally terrible at basic math. Shoppers will routinely abandon a cart containing a twenty-dollar item with five-dollar shipping, but will instantly purchase that exact same item if it is priced at twenty-six dollars with free shipping. We are so easily manipulated by the word free that companies just bake the exorbitant logistics costs directly into the base price of the product and then pat themselves on the back for their generosity. Nothing traversing the global supply chain via cargo ships, diesel trucks, and underpaid delivery drivers is actually free, but as long as the checkout screen shows a zero in the shipping column, our lizard brains will happily fork over extra cash to avoid feeling nickel-and-dimed
