If you’ve ever felt the need to join Shopaholics Anonymous, then you know what it’s like when your favorite stores launch their ‘Biggest Sale Ever’, or their ‘End of Year: Christmas Sale’. However, if those don’t excite you, then maybe the Black Friday sales do. If that doesn’t either, congratulations, you are what an economist would call a rational consumer. While the rest of us spend our money on things that we don’t usually need, you tend to buy things that actually bring you satisfaction for a longer time and are worth the money.
So what is it about sales that draws us in? We end up buying things we will probably never use – like that one pair of shoes that we all have lying in the back of our closets because they were 50% off – a deal that would never come by again, obviously. Even if they didn’t quite fit right and hardly provided any utility at all, we bought them because we thought that we just saved 50% of the price. In reality, we saved nothing. We bought an item we didn’t need and we paid the cost of it in hopes of getting that reward of satisfaction when we swipe our credit cards.
As shopaholics, we are used to labelling our addiction as ‘retail therapy’, trying to market it as something healthy that is a part of our lives. But inside, we know it’s just our humanity which never stops wanting more and more and more. This is perhaps why Black Friday sales are the best and the worst time of year. We feel great when we are out shopping and each item we buy is “half-off!”, but the truth is that all of these items add up. We come home with our wares and still feel as though we should have picked up that bag that was on sale as well. Just like Ikea is designed to make us walk through its every section, tempting us to throw that unnecessary photo frame into our cart, Black Friday sales are the same – only much worse. A deadline looms over our heads when this time of year comes around; shop now, or never.
Perhaps what is scary about offers like Black Friday is that a whole pandemic did not stop us. Consumers in the U.S. alone spent an estimated $6.3 billion, or $27.50 per person (AdobeAnalytics). If we were unable to go to malls this year, we went online, adding an ever-increasing quantity of items to our virtual baskets. This time, we didn’t even have to get home and rest that sore arm from all the heavy shopping bags that have to be carried. Regardless of the amount of shopping, we are always thinking about what we want next and producers know it.
What will it take for us to be satisfied with what we have?
