Take the Card Out of the Shops

One-click buying removes the only pause in which a person manages to change their mind. Shops pay more to remove that pause than they pay for advertising.

Open, one by one, the five places you buy from most: the marketplace, the clothing shop, the food delivery app, the game store, whatever site you drift onto in the evenings. In each, find the saved payment methods and delete the card — not disable, delete. Go into your browser settings and clear the payment autofill; on your phone, remove the card from quick checkout in every app that allows it. Keep the card saved only where a subscription you are deliberately keeping depends on it. If your physical card lives in your phone case, take it out and put it in a wallet.

For the first week you will be annoyed every time you have to get up and fetch the card — and in roughly a third of cases you will not fetch it; that is the result, not a side effect. Do not set up a «convenient» browser wallet instead, or you have simply moved the button. If somewhere will not let you delete the card without cancelling an order or closing the account, put a spending limit on that merchant in your banking app or swap in a virtual card with a zero balance. And notice which sites you opened for the first time in months, purely because you went looking for where your card was stored.