The Ritual of the Irrational Snack
You’ve cleared security at Sydney Airport’s T2. It’s early, still dark outside. The line for coffee is already too long. You’re tired, your neck’s kinked from a rough sleep, and you’re trying to guess whether your gate will be the one tucked around the corner or the one that smells like jet fuel. You’re on a short-haul work trip, maybe to Melbourne for a board meeting or to Brisbane for a site inspection, and you already know what happens next: you’ll buy something you don’t need.
Maybe it’s a $7 almond croissant. Maybe it’s a glossy magazine you won’t read, or a neck pillow even though you own three. You’re not buying for utility. You’re buying because, in that moment, it feels like the only thing you can control.
That purchase, the snack, the charger, the lip balm, the same peppermint tea from the same kiosk, isn’t a splurge or a lapse. It’s an emotional recalibration. It’s how you tell yourself: I’m okay. I’m doing something. I’m still in charge.
This is the quiet engine behind a lot of airport retail, and it’s far more psychological than it is practical.
Most articles about airport retail focus on luxury sales, duty-free margins, or data-driven layout optimisation. But those stories miss something essential: the strange, often subconscious transactions we make with ourselves while we wait to fly. Especially in domestic terminals, where the mood is more obligation than adventure, the psychology of spending is less about status and more about stability.
In this piece, we’ll explore Mood Repair Theory, a framework from psychology that explains why we shop not when we’re happy, but when we’re unsettled. We’ll look at how this theory plays out in domestic airports across Australia, where dwell times are short, flights are frequent, and travellers are more likely commuting than escaping. We’ll pull in international examples, from London to Singapore, that have cracked the code of emotional design in fast-paced terminals. And we’ll consider how airports and retailers might better serve (and not just sell to) travellers in these in-between states of mind.
Because the real question isn’t why people buy overpriced trail mix at Gate 4. It’s what they’re really reaching for when they do.
Who Shops Like This, and Why It Matters
Walk through any domestic terminal on a Tuesday morning and you’ll see a very specific type of traveller: the purposeful, the tired, the seasoned. These aren’t holidaymakers. They’re people in hi-vis vests queuing behind consultants in R.M. Williams boots. They’re court-bound relatives from regional towns. They’re engineers, educators, and executives flying because Zoom doesn’t cut it anymore, or because they’ve got no other choice.
They know where the café is without looking. They don’t need directions to the gate. And often, they make small, impulsive purchases, despite knowing full well how overpriced airport shops can be.
Why?
Because many of them are what behavioural economists would call reluctant travellers. They’re not in leisure mode, and they’re not wide-eyed. They’re moving through these spaces with efficiency but not necessarily ease. And under the surface, they’re often navigating:
- Low sleep and high stress
- Heavy emotional loads (deadlines, family responsibilities, health worries)
- A sense of dislocation (being out of their usual rhythms and environments)
And in that dislocation, tiny rituals take on oversized meaning.
Take the FIFO worker flying out of Perth to the Pilbara every second week. He doesn’t just grab a meat pie and an iced coffee, he needs that combination to ground himself before two weeks in a dusty, high-pressure environment. Or the woman on a Melbourne–Sydney day trip, already pre-emptively tired. She picks up the same mints from the same kiosk because it makes her feel a little more in control.
These aren’t consumer decisions in the usual sense. They’re self-soothing mechanisms. Subconscious gestures of continuity.
And while business-class lounges cater to elite travellers with predictable comforts, filtered light, decent food, good Wi-Fi, most domestic passengers are dealing with sparse gate areas, inconsistent retail offerings, and long queues. The terminal is, psychologically speaking, not a luxury environment. It’s a test.
In these settings, shopping doesn’t just fill time. It fills emotional gaps. And this is where Mood Repair Theory steps in, not just as a psychological framework, but as a key to understanding the everyday commerce of in-transit life.
What Is Mood Repair Theory?
At its core, Mood Repair Theory is a simple idea dressed in clinical language: when we feel bad, we do things, often small, habitual things, to feel a little less bad. It’s a coping mechanism, not a cure. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it soothes the sting.
The term came out of affective psychology in the 1980s, when researchers started noticing that people engage in certain behaviours, eating, shopping, listening to music, even just walking, to regulate negative mood states. Not to celebrate or reward themselves, but to self-stabilize. To feel like they’re okay again, or at least, less not-okay.
The key insight is this: mood repair isn’t about joy. It’s about relief.
In a high-stress, low-control environment, like an airport, these behaviours become especially visible. You’re tired, behind schedule, mentally preoccupied. Maybe your bag got flagged at security. Maybe you just had a difficult phone call. You’re not going to journal or meditate at Gate 25. But you might grab a hot drink you don’t need, or impulse-buy a pair of noise-cancelling earbuds, or spend five minutes spritzing perfume in the terminal Mecca just to feel human again.
It’s not about the item. It’s about the act.
The act says: I still have agency. I can still make a choice. I’m not entirely at the mercy of the timetable, the overhead announcements, the clumsy signage, or the slow-moving queue ahead of me. I bought the chocolate. I chose the magazine. That moment, small as it was, belonged to me.
Mood Repair Theory helps explain:
- Why people who never read gossip magazines still buy them before flights.
- Why a $5 bottled water doesn’t feel ridiculous at 6 a.m. in a departure lounge.
- Why we repeat the same purchases each trip, not because they’re needed, but because they’re known.
These are not irrational decisions. They’re psychological recalibrations. Little ways of saying: this experience is chaotic, but I’m not.
It’s especially relevant in domestic terminals, where the volume is high and the luxury is low. You’re more likely to be flying for work, for obligation, for stress, not for fun. And there’s very little cushioning between you and that stress. No champagne, no duty-free Cartier, no ambient waterfall under a glass dome.
Just vending machines, snack bars, and your own internal resources.
Unless, of course, the retail space is designed with this psychology in mind. Which, unfortunately, it usually isn’t. Not yet.
The Airport as an Emotional Landscape
Airports are designed to move bodies, not minds. But minds, inconveniently, show up anyway, tired, anxious, overstimulated, carrying invisible burdens. And when you look closely at the layout and sensory profile of most domestic terminals, you start to see the problem: they’re not just uninspiring, they’re emotionally abrasive.
Think about what happens between the curb and the gate:
- You navigate a drop-off zone full of honking cars and impatient goodbyes.
- You queue at security under fluorescent lights, shoeless and vaguely irritated.
- You’re herded through a narrow bottleneck into a terminal that smells faintly of jet fuel, burnt coffee, and stress.
- You scan a departures board that’s almost intuitive but not quite, and then walk five minutes to Gate 13, only to find it’s been moved to 22.
And somewhere in there, you’re expected to enjoy a little retail therapy?
It’s not that people don’t want to shop in airports. It’s that the emotional cost of doing so is often too high. Which is where design, and timing, come in.
Mood repair relies on a delicate balance. You have to feel just uncomfortable enough to crave a lift, but not so overstimulated that you shut down. If the queue is too long, the signage too confusing, or the walking distance too stressful, the opportunity disappears. The traveller doesn’t buy the mints. They don’t even notice the display. They just white-knuckle it to the gate and wait, half-dissociated, to board.
This is why the placement and tone of airport retail matter.
In Sydney’s T2 (Virgin’s terminal), for example, you clear security and are immediately met with a narrow, congested corridor. There’s a café, but it’s often packed, and the seating is sparse. WHSmith stands like a monolith, useful, but not inviting. Mecca adds a splash of light, but you have to walk toward it intentionally. There’s no clear space that says: “Pause here. Reorient. Breathe. Buy something, if you feel like it.”
T3 (Qantas) is slightly better. The lighting is warmer. The signage clearer. The Hudsons café doesn’t try to be anything it’s not, and there’s a sense of rhythm in the space, like you’re being walked gently from entrance to gate. But even here, the emotional landscape feels transactional, not therapeutic.
Compare this to Heathrow’s Terminal 5, where large open spaces, high ceilings, and carefully positioned retail hubs invite browsing without pressure. Or Vancouver International, where indigenous art and natural materials reduce cognitive friction and visually signal calm. You don’t need a waterfall like Changi to feel better, you just need not to feel worse.
The lesson? Emotional design isn’t about adding more. It’s about reducing unnecessary strain. Clearer wayfinding, better lighting, fewer bottlenecks, and one well-placed shop near a boarding area can do more for a traveller’s emotional state than a designer perfume counter lost in the maze.
And when the environment supports emotional recovery, purchases follow naturally, not because travellers are being manipulated, but because they’re being met with empathy.
Why Queues and Wait Times Break the Spell
Here’s something rarely acknowledged in airport retail design: mood repair is highly time-sensitive.
Not just in terms of minutes available before boarding, but in terms of what the traveller’s nervous system is doing in that minute.
If they’ve just emerged from a tense security interaction, or they’re unsure whether they’ll make their gate in time, or they see a 9-person queue at the only café with warm food, their capacity for discretionary engagement collapses. They don’t browse. They don’t explore. They switch into task mode: get through, don’t mess up, just get to the gate.
This creates a paradox: the people most emotionally primed for mood repair (stressed, depleted, cognitively overloaded) are also the least likely to shop unless the environment is low-friction.
Think of it as an emotional window. When the design and flow are smooth, when queues are fast, signage is intuitive, and seating is available, that window stays open just long enough for the chocolate bar or the moisturiser or the magazine to make its move.
But when the queue stretches past three people, or there’s confusion about whether a store is self-serve, or payment systems are clunky, that window slams shut.
This is why some international airports have invested heavily in service fluidity, not just speed, but psychological clarity:
- At Schiphol, retail spaces are dotted throughout the concourse and supported by self-checkout kiosks, removing bottlenecks without removing human presence.
- Incheon Airport designs its retail clusters so that they intercept foot traffic naturally, without detours or effort.
- At London City Airport, which serves high-frequency, short-dwell business travellers, small footprint stores are placed directly in gate line-of-sight with minimal queue depth.
The throughline in all of these examples? They treat queue anxiety not as a logistical issue, but as a barrier to emotional agency.
In contrast, many Australian domestic terminals still default to a model where retail is crammed into narrow central corridors, forcing travellers to either push through congestion or bypass it entirely. Queues snake into walkways. Payment takes too long. Staff are often under-resourced. And the physical layout of kiosks can leave travellers unsure if it’s okay to “just look.”
The fix doesn’t require a rebuild. It requires a shift in what success looks like. Not just dollars per square metre, but dwell time per product, glance-to-grab ratio, and the number of transactions completed with visible ease.
Here’s the principle:
If it takes more than 30 seconds of thought, the purchase won’t happen. If it feels like a favour to the retailer instead of a favour to yourself, the moment is lost.
Retail that aligns with Mood Repair Theory works because it understands what the traveller needs before they do. And it gets out of their way.
What Australian Airports Could Do Differently
Let’s be honest: most Australian domestic terminals work just fine. Flights leave. People get where they’re going. Coffee is served. But functionality isn’t the same as emotional intelligence, and if airports want to evolve from transactional corridors into meaningful environments, they need to stop treating retail as a passive revenue stream and start treating it as emotional infrastructure.
Because here’s the truth: we don’t buy things in airports for rational reasons. We buy them because we’re in a moment of psychological transition, and the right object at the right time offers something to hold onto.
So what would it look like for an airport to intentionally design for that moment?
Let’s break it down.
- Redesign the Emotional Map
Right now, most Australian domestic terminals (Sydney T2 and T3, Brisbane Domestic, even Melbourne’s T1) operate on a flow model that prioritises movement over mood. Travellers are ushered from security to gate with efficiency in mind, but that efficiency often comes at the cost of comfort.
What if we flipped the script?
- Create “pause zones” just past security: small, quiet spaces with ambient lighting and tactile textures, think warm wood, plants, art.
- Place retail within line-of-sight of these zones, so browsing feels like a soft transition rather than a detour.
- Incorporate seating inside or adjacent to stores, so purchases don’t feel rushed or transactional.
- Curate for the Emotional Palette, Not Just the Wallet
Retail should be built around how people feel, not just what they might want.
Instead of endless rows of the same snacks and branded neck pillows, imagine:
- Mood-driven bundles: “Tense Morning” packs with mints, a soothing tea sachet, and a crossword book. “Delayed Flight Survival Kits” with a charger, lip balm, and trail mix.
- Sensory displays that invite touch and smell: calming creams, essential oils, noise-softening earplugs.
- Empathetic signage: “Forgot something? We’ve got you.” / “Need a minute? Take one here.”
This isn’t about coddling. It’s about meeting people where they are, and offering small acts of psychological care.
- Design Queues That Don’t Feel Like Punishment
We’ve already established that queues kill mood repair purchases. But queues themselves aren’t the enemy, poorly designed ones are.
Airports could:
- Introduce express checkout lanes or mobile pay options for key retail hotspots.
- Use spatial cues (floor markings, vertical signage) to make line length obvious at a glance.
- Equip kiosks with touchless scan-and-go technology so that buying a banana doesn’t feel like a negotiation.
The emotional effect is subtle but profound: you’re not being held hostage by the system. You’re still in charge.
- Look to International Examples, But Adapt Smartly
Singapore’s Changi isn’t replicable in Wagga Wagga or even in Brisbane. But the principles are:
- Create sensory variety: light, sound, scent, and materials that offer more than sterile uniformity.
- Layer experiences into the journey: a comfortable seat, a curious product, a local brand story.
Even smaller innovations, like self-checkout pods at London City Airport or emotional zoning at Vancouver International, are scalable. You don’t need a waterfall. You just need intention.
- Think Like a Hospitality Brand, Not a Transit Hub
The most forward-thinking airports treat their passengers like guests, not logistical problems.
What if Sydney T2 had a rotating local gift shop that changed with the season or region?
What if Adelaide Airport leaned into its wine culture and offered micro-tastings for passengers with 15 minutes to spare?
What if Perth built a “re-entry space” for FIFO workers coming off long swings, complete with gentle lighting, music, and thoughtful retail that didn’t shout, Buy now!, but whispered, Welcome home?
These aren’t just nice ideas. They’re competitive advantages in a world where people are craving connection in even the smallest interactions.
Why It Matters
Most of us won’t remember what we bought at the airport last month. We won’t remember which terminal newsstand sold us the trail mix or whether the hand cream we grabbed was lavender or lemongrass. What we do remember is how we felt when we bought it.
That slightly panicked calm as we fumbled through tap payment.
The small, irrational satisfaction of holding something solid.
The weird relief of acting on impulse, in a place where almost everything else is out of our hands.
Airport purchases, especially in domestic terminals, are rarely about the object. They’re about the moment, that brief, fragile minute when we try to make ourselves feel okay in the midst of noise, fatigue, and transience. That KitKat wasn’t hunger. That magazine wasn’t curiosity. That charger wasn’t just a backup. They were all small affirmations of selfhood in a context designed to strip it away.
Mood Repair Theory doesn’t just explain why people shop in airports. It explains why they reach. And what they’re reaching for isn’t always visible.
For retailers, this is a quiet opportunity: not to exploit emotional vulnerability, but to serve it with empathy and precision. To anticipate needs that aren’t purely transactional. To create spaces where a traveller feels seen, not processed.
For airport operators, it’s a wake-up call. The future isn’t more stores or fancier signage. It’s human-centred design for high-frequency, short-dwell, emotionally taxed passengers. It’s not just about squeezing dollars from foot traffic. It’s about offering an experience where spending feels like a choice, not a coping mechanism.
And for the rest of us, the ones moving through these spaces weekly, monthly, or just often enough to know the rhythm, it’s worth pausing to ask:
What’s your airport ritual?
And what part of you is it soothing, distracting, or gently carrying through the liminal space between who you were before the flight and who you have to be when you land?
Because in that question lies the whole truth: airports aren’t just places we pass through. They’re places where we reveal ourselves in miniature. And maybe, just maybe, the things we buy there aren’t irrational at all. They’re reminders that we still get to choose how we feel, even when we don’t get to choose where we are.
