Retail Therapy

Riffing on persuasion and the holiday shopping season.

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.”

—Napoleon Bonaparte

As you might have heard, the holiday shopping season is already upon us. The signs, online ads, tv and radio commercials, and email barrage are all hard to miss. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Taco Tuesday. Where does it end??

So the question is: Knowing what we do about how pricing can impact our decision-making and influence our purchasing, what should we look out for?

How can we better evaluate what these stores are offering us in sales? Are we getting the deals they want us to believe we are?

I spotted a Wirecutter article puts it plainly: “It’s quite often difficult to know whether an offering is an overhyped ‘sale’ that doesn’t provide a meaningful discount or an actual deal.” As the article points out, shoppers are more likely to buy an item marked “on sale” than they would be to buy the same item, for the same price, if it weren’t …