Get new posts by email:
  

Why Do People Buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

There are a couple of obvious explanations for why people buy more stuff on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

1. Retailers offer better prices enticing people who have been thinking about buying to finally pull the trigger.

2. People are helpless victims of mass advertising and are deluded into thinking that they are acting along with their many friends.

I have one more possible reason to add to this list: people look for excuses to follow their desires rather than use restraint. We see a similar effect with people who try to eat healthily. Even people with good salaries who can afford to eat anything they want will get overly excited about free donuts or pizza. They can afford to buy junk food, but they usually show restraint and eat healthy food. The free junk food is an excuse to indulge.

So, for people who have a desire to shop, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great excuse for going off their "diets".

<< Previous Post Next Post >>

Comments

  1. geneNovember 30, 2011 at 8:20 PM

    Makes me think of that joke about two old ladies eating lunch at a new restaurant. #1: "The food is awful here. #2: "Yes, awful! And such small portions!"

    I guess it's a mixture of the loosening of spending with the Christmas season setting in, the most attractive sales of the year, and the social/media reinforcement that it's the right thing to do. Ha! I just restated what you said!

    The food's not that great, but it's cheap, and we want as much as we can get. By the way, have you met my brand new tablet computer? I don't need it, but I got a great deal on it! Your post has my personality figured out perfectly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael JamesNovember 30, 2011 at 10:47 PM

    @Gene: I have a tablet now. It's almost completely useless except for Youtube and resolving arguments in front of the television using IMDB.

    ReplyDelete
  3. geneNovember 30, 2011 at 11:39 PM

    lol. I think I may have the same one. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to rent a movie on it so I could take advantage of its excellent screen (seems it's still impossible). Ended up watching a bunch of youtube videos instead. Thanks for the laugh.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Takes: InvestorLine’s HISAs, 24-Hour Trading, and more

I recently moved some cash into BMO InvestorLine’s high-interest savings accounts (HISAs) that are structured as mutual funds.  Their designations are BMT104, BMT109, and BMT114, and they purportedly pay 4.35% annual interest (which they can change whenever they like).  However, the way they report the monthly interest payments is so baffling that I wasn’t able to sort it out in my first 15 minutes of trying.  A further complication is the following text in the HISA description: “The Bank may pay, monthly or quarterly, compensation to your Dealer at an annual rate of up to 0.25% of the daily closing balance in the BMO HISA.”  I couldn’t find any evidence of such a charge, but I haven’t been invested for a full quarter, and I can’t yet say that such a charge isn’t buried somehow in the confusing reporting.  I have more digging to do before I can recommend these HISAs. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee explains the dangers of Robi...
Read more

My Asset Allocation

I’ve resisted discussing my asset allocation for some time, but now is finally the time to describe it and the reasons behind it. I’m not holding it out as a model portfolio; I believe it’s suitable for me and not necessarily anyone else. With that warning, enjoy the discussion and feel free to ask questions or take some pot-shots. The main reason why I haven’t discussed my asset allocation in detail before now is that I don’t want readers to treat it like a model portfolio and follow it blindly. Everyone’s situation is different. The need for variation in asset allocation from one investor to the next usually isn’t huge, but there is no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A secondary reason for keeping my asset allocation to myself is that I can’t be sure I’ll never change it. For example, I recently made the minor change of switching from an ETF of small-cap stocks to an ETF of small-cap value stocks . I don’t have any plans to change my current allocation, but I may think differe...
Read more

What to Do About Crazy Stock Valuations

Image
The last time I had to put a lot of effort into thinking about my finances was back when I retired in mid-2017.  I had ideas of how to manage my money after retirement, but it wasn’t until a couple of years had gone by that I felt confident that my long-term plans would work for me.  I had my portfolio on autopilot, and my investing spreadsheet would email me if I needed to take some action. I was fortunate that I happened to retire into a huge bull market.  I got the upside of sequence-of-returns risk.  The downside risk is that stocks will plummet during your early retirement years, and your regular spending will dig deep into your portfolio.  Happily for me, I got the opposite result.  My family’s spending barely made a dent in the relentless rise of the stock market. However, stock prices have become crazy, particularly in the U.S.  One measure of stock priciness is Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio .  In the U.S...
Read more

Archive

Show more