Does citrus smell make you buy?

Under certain conditions, a citrus smell seemed to magically open the pocketbooks of shoppers and increase their desire to spend, according to Jean-Charles Chebat of the HEC Montreal graduate school of business, Richard Michon of Ryerson University in Toronto and L.W. Turley of Western Kentucky University. Their findings appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Business Research.

But retailers with a nose for sales should not order industrial-size vaporizers and fill them with orange scent just yet. The researchers cautioned that the citrus smell provoked additional spending only if stores were moderately busy. If they were too crowded or too empty, the power of citrus disappeared. "Crowds have their own smells," Chebat said in an e-mail. "Citrus can counterbalance the effects of such smells to a certain extent. However, it has its limitations. As for the least crowded environments, citrus may be too arousing."

Here is the full story.  Here is another summary, which includes a discussion of using scents to encourage gambling.  Here is a link to the paper and related works.