Or, at least, you may find yourself wanting to.Once upon a time it was December when retail sales skyrocketed, but November has swiftly stolen the shopping limelight. But with REI opting out, the sports chain is giving itself the opportunity to differentiate in a significant - and potentially lucrative - way: they can simply hold their sale later.īut if you’re a Canadian shopper looking for a big-screen TV - not an American shopper scoping out deals on hiking gear - you’re still going to have to get in line. It’s a smart marketing ploy.Īs Forbes pointed out earlier this week, with every big box store under the sun participating in Black Friday, it’s difficult for the consumer to tell where they’ll be getting the best deal, and that can lead to fatigue and apathy - and the absence of many of the stimuli that make shopping on sale so satisfying to begin with. Sports retailer REI made headlines by completely opting out of Black Friday this year, closing its 143 stores on Nov. It would seem to be an inescapable cocktail for continued excess - sales trigger our instincts for hunting and gathering at the same time as they urge us to compete against one another, all the while setting off our brains’ pleasure centre, but while the popularity of Black Friday is still growing in Canada, in the U.S. Part of what makes sales holidays so objectionable - the blatant consumerism of it all - is also what drives so many to participate: we simply want to do better than one another, even when it comes to spending our own money on things that, again, we might not even need. 26, 2008, there was a thrill to be gotten from racing ahead of others in line - without knowing their respective objects of desire - in pursuit of his goal. Black Friday is an eyes-on-the-prize, individual sport, and often a contact one: if you’re a social media user, you’ll be confronted with photo and video evidence of fistfights and violent mobs all clawing for the same loss-leading sales this coming Friday. It’s competitive, too: certainly, when my father entered the store in the wee hours of Dec. We also tend to internalize getting a good deal as a sort of personal accomplishment or expression of ability. We might think we’re making a rational decision based on the amount of money we’ve saved, in other words, but the fact of the matter is that the type of blowout sales that take place on Black Friday can prey on our psyches so much we begin to act on a bizarro survivalist instinct, mentally processing bargain shopping as though we’re gathering necessary goods ahead of a period of potential scarcity. It’s how you end up spending $200 on a fifth pair of leather boots: they were 75 percent off, and they were the last pair! You had to! Shown a sale price, and the brain’s nucleus ambens - otherwise known as the pleasure centre - lit up. Stores that market deals as clearance sales or last-chance buys, for instance, trigger a fear of missing out - hearing the words “get it now, before it’s gone” in a commercial or over a loudspeaker may make us feel an urgent desire to buy things we don’t really need, simply because we might never have a chance to get them so cheaply again. Sales tap into some real primal impulses. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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