The 'Average' Consumer in the Dark Pattern Age – A qualitative exploration into vulnerability and coping strategies exhibited by consumers to inform the Digital Fairness Act

Digital-choice architectures are increasingly engineered to exploit cognitive bias, calling into question the European Union's long-standing "average consumer" benchmark. While the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) promises stricter limits on manipulative design, the empirical basis for calibrating those limits remains patchy. This study supplies a consumer-centric evidence base. A total of 95 German shoppers were interviewed. As part of the interviews, they completed real online-purchase journeys while thinking aloud; their verbalizations were analyzed following qualitative thematic coding principles. Two cross-cutting themes emerged. (1) Context is King: the same countdown timer or scarcity claim was either ignored or decisive depending on task urgency, fulfilment trust and device constraints, revealing vulnerability as episodic rather than categorical. (2) The Opportunistic Consumer: far from helpless, participants deployed a previously under-reported coping repertoire comprising aggressive filter pruning, platform loyalty, strategic delay and voucher recycling to realign interfaces with their own goals. These tactics typically neutralized low-stakes nudges but broke down against post-purchase "roach motels" that thwart cancellation of newsletters or unwanted user accounts. The findings advance theory and policy in three ways. First, they map dual-process psychology onto concrete shopping stages, showing that System-1 heuristics can insulate as well as expose users to dark patterns. Second, they complicate the binary average versus vulnerable consumer doctrine by documenting situational autonomy and deliberate rule-bending. Third, they outline a risk-tiered regulatory template for the DFA: benign, reversible nudges may remain permissible, whereas lock-ins and highstakes, irreversible manipulations warrant heightened duty-of-care and streamlined redress. By grounding legal benchmarks in the lived realities of digital commerce, the study provides actionable guidance for legislators, competent authorities and platform designers seeking a proportionate path to genuinely fair online markets.