Buy experiences instead of things.

The best things I've bought have been good because they created good experiences while using them. So I wondered if the authors restricted 'things' to those that don't generate use-experiences and kind of work in the background, or if there's another distinction I'm missing.

For instance, I recently bought an expensive new set of speakers. They're very shiny and prestigious and luxurious. But the real reason I love them is that I've had some amazing experiences listening to music through them, which I also remember and cherish while away from them.

Certainly there are pure experential purchases, which don't leave material possessions after the experience ends, like buying tickets to a movie. I found it harder to think of pure material purchases which don't generate experiences.

Also, many material purchases are made not to generate good experiences, but to eliminate bad ones: I bought a dishwasher to stop washing dishes. Now that it's here I don't think about it much, which means it's working well. Asking people for happiness without asking for lack-of-unhappiness ignores such purchases.

So I looked at what the paper says:

Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) defined experiential purchases as those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience: an event or series of events that one lives through, while defining material purchases as those made with the primary intention of acquiring a material good: a tangible object that is kept in one’s possession (p. 1194). Although there is a fuzzy boundary between these two types of purchases, with many purchases (e.g., a new car) falling somewhere in the hazy middle, consumers are consistently able to describe past purchases that clearly fit these definitions, both in their own minds and the minds of coders trained in this distinction (Carter & Gilovich, 2010, p. 156).

In the example quoted later in the article, people were "asked to think of a material and an experiential purchase they had made with the intention of increasing their own happiness [and] asked which of the two purchases made them happier". I think there would have been all kinds of confounders and biases involved. And the question itself assumes a bimodal distribution of purchases (material and experiential).

I don't have access to the full texts of the references, but from this summary I don't get the impression this is well founded.