This piece of Canadian-made music is designed to specifically boost sales in your store

Marketers, retailers, barkeeps, and restaurant owners have long known that they can manipulate their clients and customers with carefully chosen background music.

For example. fast-food restaurants will play faster, upbeat music knowing that it will cause customers to eat faster creating more turnover. Fine dining spots will play classical and jazz because studies have shown that this music not only causes people to linger longer (and therefore order more drinks and things like dessert) but also to order more expensive cocktails than they normally might.

When it comes to retailers, the right music can put customers at ease, make them browse longer, and boost the chances that they’re going to buy something.

Knowing this, Interac, the debit system that everyone in Canada uses, has just launched “Sound Shopping, a new music track that provides a balanced backdrop to the shopping experience, intended to promote mindful spending at a time of great financial pressure and unease.”

It’s not long–around 24 minutes–but that’s all that’s necessary because Interac studies show that this is the average length of time of the average shopping experience. The right music, they say, can create “a more mindful shopping experience.”

Interac says that the bespoke piece boosted feelings of calm by a factor of three for those who were exposed to it.

Given the current economy, inflation, and world affairs, this could get shoppers to open up their wallets by de-stressing them. In other words, this music could rescue us from financial ruin by boosting consumer spending. Or something like that.

This kind of music-and-retail composition hasn’t apparently been tried before, so it’s worth a shot. Woe to employees, though, who have to listen to the same 24 minute track over and over and over and over and over. A quick bit of math says that over a typical eight hour shift, you’ll hear it 20 times.

Try it out.