Multi-buy doesn’t create urgency.
It does the opposite.

Most trade promotion teams still treat multi-buy as a way to speed decisions. Buy two. Save money. Act now.

That belief survives because the promotion week performs. Units lift. The result lands.

But repeated multi-buy does not change whether people buy.
It changes when they buy.

Once the same products appear on the same mechanic often enough, shoppers stop using the shelf price to decide. They wait for the deal.

That behaviour does not show up during the promotion.
It shows up in the weeks after.

The effect sits between promotions, not inside them

Increasingly what we're seeing is that when promotional teams look at weekly sales sequentially, not in a promotional summary.

Deal weeks spike.
Non-deal weeks do not recover to their prior run rate.

Sales do not collapse. They settle lower. That lower level persists until the next promotion resets the spike.

This is not anecdotal.

According to NIQ Australia category data referenced in 2025 industry briefings, more than 55% of unit volume in major ambient grocery categories is now sold on promotion, with multi-buy mechanics accounting for a growing share of that volume.

Once more than half your category volume depends on deal timing, full-price weeks no longer set the baseline. They sit underneath it.

Over time, that pattern becomes the baseline the business plans against.

Forecasts are trimmed to avoid repeat misses. Future plans assume the deal will return. The promotion stops being optional without anyone explicitly deciding that.

At this point, multi-buy no longer interrupts demand.
It schedules it.

The number that changes how uplift should be read

A 2025 Shop! ANZ and Vypr study reported:

• 90% of shoppers bought a product because it was on promotion
• 43% actively changed behaviour to access a deal
  
  

This is not deal responsiveness.
It is conditional demand.

If nine in ten purchases are triggered by promotion, then the shelf price is not anchoring value. It is signalling “wait”.

Once that learning settles in, urgency does not return when the tag comes off. It disappears from full-price weeks.

Why cost-of-living is an incomplete explanation

Cost pressure explains why promotions work.

It does not explain why full-price sales fail to recover when prices and availability remain unchanged.

What changes is the decision rule.

Shoppers stop deciding whether to buy.
They decide whether the deal is due.

Multi-buy trains that rule.
And once trained, the category behaves as if full-price demand is optional.

Where this becomes visible in practice

You can see this most clearly in staple ambient categories like coffee, laundry, and packaged pantry items.

Take a typical national coffee SKU running on a predictable multi-buy cycle. During deal weeks, volume lifts sharply. In the four to six weeks after, many teams are seeing that sales do not revert to their previous run rate. Often, they sit lower until the next deal restores the spike.

Over successive cycles, more volume migrates into deal weeks. The “in-between” weeks thin out. Eventually, the business stops expecting those weeks to perform at all.

At that point, removing the promotion no longer feels like a commercial test.
It feels like a forecast risk.

Where multi-buy stops being a tactic

After a few cycles, multi-buy stops just lifting performance. It can become the default mechanism to protect it.

Removing the deal no longer feels risky because of shopper reaction.
It feels risky because of what it does to the forecast.

That is why multi-buy persists even when its long-term effects are recognised. It converts uncertainty into a defensible number.

What repeated multi-buy hides

Frequent multi-buy hides that:

• the shelf price no longer carries belief
• volume is being pulled forward, not grown
• loyalty has shifted from product to timing
• full-price weeks are no longer expected to perform
  
  

The question
that remains

The next multi-buy will lift sales again.
The result will be easy to explain.

The harder question becomes:

Is the softness that follows “just the category”?

Or is it the cost of teaching shoppers that buying now is optional?

Because once urgency only exists when you pay for it, the real issue is not promotion mechanics.

It is whether your base price still does anything at all.