There are many, many reasons not to participate in Black Friday. Maybe you like sleeping in and spending time with family more than lining up in a mall parking lot at 2 a.m. Maybe you object on humanitarian grounds to the ever-earlier opening times, which force employees of big-box retailers to cut their holidays short by reporting to work in the middle of the night. (Or, increasingly, on Thanksgiving itself.) But among the most potent reasons no sane person should participate in Black Friday is this: It is carefully designed to make you behave like an idiot. The big problem with Black Friday, from a behavioral economists perspective, is that every incentive a consumer could possibly have to participate — the promise of doorbuster deals on big-ticket items like TVs and computers, the opportunity to get all your holiday shopping done at once — is either largely illusory or outweighed by a disincentive on the other side. Its a nationwide experiment in consumer irrationality, dressed up as a cheerful holiday add-on. As Dan Ariely explains in his book, Predictably Irrational, We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. This applies to shopping on the other 364 days of the year, too. But on Black Friday, our rational decision-making faculties are at their weakest, just as stores are trying their hardest to maximize your mistakes. Here are just a few of the behavioral traps you might fall into this Friday: The doorbuster: The doorbuster is a big-ticket item (typically, a TV or other consumer electronics item) that retailers advertise at an extremely low cost. (At Best Buy this year, its this $179.99 Toshiba TV.) We call these things loss-leaders, but rarely are the items actually sold at a loss. More often, theyre sold at or slightly above cost in order to get you in the store, where youll buy more stuff that is priced at normal, high-margin levels. Thats the retailers Black Friday secret: You never just buy the TV. You buy the gold-plated HDMI cables, the fancy wall-mount kit (with the installation fee), the expensive power strip, and the Xbox game that catches your eye across the aisle. And by the time youre checking out, any gains you might have made on the TV itself have vanished. Implied scarcity: This is when a store attempts to drum up interest in an item by claiming limited quantity or maximum two per customer, which makes us think were getting something valuable when we may not be. Its a staple of deceptive marketing, and at no time in the calendar year is it in wider use than on Black Friday. (There is also actual scarcity on Black Friday — when stores carry only a 50 or 100 of an advertised doorbuster item — which also introduces a risk that youll be 51st or 101th in line and waste your time entirety. Both are bad.) Confirmation bias: As Derek Thompson points out, many shoppers neglect to factor in the non-cash costs of their Black Friday trip — gas, parking, warranties, and rebates. (To say nothing of the vacation time lost to waiting in lines.) Shoppers want to believe they save money by going out on Black Friday, so they use only their per-item savings in calculating the benefits of their trip. But on a net basis, its often not a very good deal. Irrational escalation: This behavioral quirk is also known as the sunk cost fallacy, and it means that people are bad at knowing when to give up on unprofitable endeavors. This happens a lot on Black Friday. If youve already made the initial, bad investment of getting up at 2 a.m., driving to the mall, finding parking, and waiting in line for a store to open, youll be inclined to buy more than you initially came for. (Since, after all, youre already there, and whats another few hundred dollars?) Pain anesthetization: One of my favorite pieces of shopping-related research is a 2007 paper called Neural Predictors of Purchases which used fMRI scans of shoppers brains to show how deeply irrational the purchasing process is. Researchers found that if a shopper saw a price that was lower than expected, his medial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for decision-making) lit up, while higher-than-expected prices caused the insula (the pain-registering part) to go wild. That brain activity had a strong correlation to whether or not the shoppers ended up buying the products or not. Economists typically think of consumer choice as dispassionate cost-benefit analysis by rational market actors — a bunch of people saying to themselves, Will having this $179.99 TV now create more pleasure than having the $179.99 in my bank account to do other things in the future? — but the 2007 study shows that shoppers dont actually behave that way at all. In fact, theyre choosing between immediate pleasure and immediate pain. That explains why, on Black Friday, retailers pull out every trick in their playbook to minimize the immediate pain of buying: instant rebates, in-house credit cards with one-time sign-up discounts, multi-year layaway plans, and the like. The problem, of course, is that those methods of short-term anesthetization often carry long-term consequences — like astronomically high interest rates and hidden fees. Post-purchase rationalization: When weve bought something expensive, we tend to overlook its flaws or defects in order to justify our decision. On Black Friday, the investment is more than just financial — weve emotionally invested in the post-holiday ritual of standing in line with friends or family and enduring cold, dark misery for the shot at cheap electronics. That excess investment leads to excess rationalization, and coupled with a return/refund process that is a nightmare at many big-box retailers, it leads to people owning a lot of things theyre not very happy with. In short, if shopping on the other 364 days of the year is the behavioral economists version of bringing a knife to a gunfight, going out on Black Friday is going to that same gunfight with a knife made out of Play-Doh. tinyurl/lnql6yz The social messages of a zombie apocalypse generally include: the government is entirely ineffectual or counter-productive; the media is useless; don’t trust the infrastructure; people must defend themselves; cooperation increases the chance of survival; and, the inability to cooperate is a fatal human flaw. It is a nihilistic, anti-establishment, cynical commentary with flashes of heroism and humanity set against a background of violence. The zombies themselves are another message. The walking dead are metaphors for the American public which is programmed for deadness to everything but consumerism. The 1983 study Midnight Movies called Romero’s most famous movie “the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself.” The ‘living’ are prey for the zombie public, and they must scramble to avoid becoming zombies as well. The Romero movies repeat the sentiment: “We are them, they are us.” Zombie apocalypses are the ultimate portrayal of the masses rising up to annihilate the status quo. Alas, the masses remain unthinking and dead. In their rising, they make no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They simply overwhelm and consume until the old reality is no more. Consider a brief analysis of the movie that started it all: Night of the Living Dead (1968). Seven average people are trapped in a farmhouse with useless media info, no help from authority, and surrounded by mindless masses. The characters die to literally feed the rampaging zombies who are also average Americans. Why have the latter transformed into zombies? A casual theory of radiation is floated. But, ultimately, their brain-dead hunger is merely presented as a reality. It is also the portrayal of a political nightmare. The movie was produced at the peak of the Vietnam War and in the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. A traumatized and disillusioned America was in the throes of a cultural revolution with the young railing against their parents’ consumerism; America struggled with simmering warfare between the races; it watched the senseless violence of Vietnam every evening on the news. Romero’s classic opens with a shot of an American flag trembling in the wind from a cemetery. It reaffirms a status quo in which chaotic violence suddenly and irrevocably bursts like a dam. Night immediately breaks stereotypes; for example, a black man is the hero in an otherwise all-white cast. After an epic battle for survival, he dies from a gunshot delivered by white ‘redneck’ types who mistake him for a zombie. Over and over, stereotypes are both broken and bitterly reinforced. The ultimate message: authority and mass mentality are the enemies. But the world has gone so far off a cliff that independent thought and action do not guarantee salvation. In Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero’s survivors retreat to a mall as a stronghold with needed supplies. This is his most explicit assault on mindless, modern consumerism. A main character explains why the zombies are thronged at the mall’s glass doors. He says, “Instinct. Memory. It’s something they used to do. It was an important place in their lives.” In short, the walking dead are doing the same thing as they did as the walking living. This glimpse of voracious humanity is all the more horrifying because it contains truth. The movie’s ultimate clash, however, is between two gangs of humans and it leads to a lethal assault by opportunistic zombies. In Day of the Dead (1985) survivors are stranded in an underground bunker. They consists of military, scientists and support civilians. This is Romero’s commentary on the conflict between militarism and science, and the inability of both to address social reality; it is also the conflict of militarism and science against the average person as expressed either through zombies or the civilians. The scientists themselves battle over the purpose of research on zombies. Ultimately, a suicidal member brings disaster into the bunker when he opens a platform door to the outside. In Land of the Dead (2005), the survivors live in a city bounded by water and electric fences. This is Romero’s analysis of class conflict. Among the living, a sharp distinction exists between elites who live in a luxury high rise and prols who exist on the streets and maraud surrounding areas for supplies. Between the living and the dead, zombies come across as an oppressed class that is evolving its own consciousness. In several scenes, Romero openly sympathizes with the dead who eventually occupy the city. Romero is one of the most chilling critics of American culture and politics. Those who see only gore and senseless violence in his work do not altogether miss his themes. The gore of America – both psychological and actual – is a core aspect of Romero’s message. As the narrative arc of his four zombie movies progresses, the line between the living and the dead begins to blur. At one point in Land of the Dead, a character declares of the zombies, “They’re pretending to be alive.” The hero replies, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive?” The arc of Romero’s zombie apocalypse begins with the living visiting the dead in a cemetery. It ends with the few who are still alive fleeing from an awakened zombie mob that captures a city for its home. Here Romero’s nihilism is at its deepest. The ancien regime has been swept away; another form of human order has risen from chaos and ashes. Will it fare better? Can it do worse? tinyurl/bkk5rww
Posted on: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 15:37:08 +0000
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