SEIZE THE DAY
The psychology of desire and fear of missing out spur the craziness of annual Black Friday frenzy
A few hours before dawn on the day after U.S. Thanksgiving in 2008, nearly 2,000 shoppers were lined up outside a Wal-mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island, N.Y., as part of a so-called “Blitz Line” to start Black Friday. As a manager counted down from 10 to mark the opening, the crowd, fit to burst with anticipation, surged forward in a frenzy, and blew the front doors out of their frames.
Inside, in a narrow vestibule lined with vending machines, several of the store’s largest employees, reassigned from the stockroom to help guide the flow of customers, were knocked back by the force of the crowd’s entrance. One man, Jdimytai Damour, of Jamaica, Queens, fell under the doors and was trampled as hundreds made their way into the store. He suffocated to death. An article in The New Yorker later reported that Damour was found with his “tongue out and his eyes rolled back.”
Every year since, in the wake of similarly torrid Black Friday sales, videos from the front lines of malls and department stores in the throes of retail madness go viral. Talkshow pundits and newspaper columnists rabidly decry the culture of unabated consumerism that compels ordinary men and women to shove, wail and wrestle their way to a simple discount. And a whole lot of people spend a whole lot of money on a whole lot of clothes, furniture, housewares, sporting goods, video games and consumer electronics, seduced by the siren song of an irresistible deal.
Those in the U.S. are hardly the only shoppers susceptible to the mania, even though Black Friday itself is affiliated with a holiday we celebrate in Canada a month earlier. A recent study by the Retail Council of Canada estimates Canadians will spend $12.6 billion on the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, more than ever before.
What drives consumers to pursue sales with such fervour? The psychology of discounts has been well documented. Occasions such as Black Friday exploit two characteristics of human behaviour simultaneously: the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
We seek deals because they offer the allure of the exclusive and desirable. Conversely, we are anxious to take advantage while the sale lasts, because we want to avoid losing out by squandering a rare opportunity. Black Friday, we are emphatically reminded, comes around only once every year. Supplies are limited: Act now, don’t delay, miss this and you will live to regret it. Whether Black Friday deals really are so rare or valuable is irrelevant — we’ve all seen the bargain we scored even more heavily discounted the week after Christmas. What matters is the impression an event such as Black Friday creates. It produces a sense of urgency, and we are powerfully drawn to seize the day.
Brands have understood the effectiveness of sales promotions for more than a century. In 1887, the year after the product was introduced to the market, Coca-cola issued the first-ever coupon — a voucher that could be redeemed at local pharmacies for one free Coke. It proved enormously successful. “Between 1894 and 1913, an estimated one in nine Americans received a free Coca-cola, for a total of 8,500,000 free drinks,” the website Coupon Sherpa says. The promotion “transformed Coca-cola from an insignificant tonic into a market-dominating drink.”
What Coca-cola rightly predicted was that a coupon could be a potent intoxicant. It made people feel they were gaining some invaluable advantage, and the satisfaction derived from the deal was even more alluring than the complimentary drink.
Deals are so influential on the mind of the consumer that they can actually change the chemistry of the brain. A 2012 study by a neuroeconomics professor on the effect of discounts on the happiness and health of consumers found that even a low-value deal could cause someone to “feel more relaxed and less stressed,” the Huffington Post reports. People given a voucher for $10 in savings “experienced a 38-per-cent rise in oxytocin levels and were 11 per cent happier than those who did not receive a coupon.” Their rate of respiration “dropped 32 per cent,” while their “heart rates decreased by five per cent and sweat levels were reportedly 20 times lower than their peers.”
We do not seek sales simply to save a bit of money. We do it because we’re chasing a high.
Retailers don’t arbitrarily provide discounts for the benefit of their customers. Sales are big business: Amazon’s “Prime Day” — essentially another Black Friday, only in the middle of July — generated $3.5 billion in sales over a 48-hour period in 2018, and, even more incredibly, brought in more than $1 billion to other retailers, because of the impulse for shopping and thirst for deals created by the event. (Many brands offered discounts of their own to compete with Amazon.)
Big sales events such as Prime Day or Black Friday have such a strong claim on the popular imagination that they provoke an outsized desire to spend across the industry. We all become so enthusiastic for savings, in other words, that we all spend a ton of money. The country coughs up billions — but our overall sentiment remains positive, because we’re thrilled to have supposedly snagged a deal.
Prime Day is pretty low-key, as sales holidays go: You lurk on the internet from the comfort of your laptop, rather than shlepping out at dawn to the nearest Wal-mart or mall.
In the age of online shopping, why does brick-and-mortar Black Friday shopping continue to thrive? It does so in the face of the riot-like atmosphere and mad panic of the roads en route. (Vehicular collisions go up 34 per cent on Black Friday across the United States.) But of course the challenges presented by Black Friday are precisely the attraction for most people.
All sales work on the principles of exclusivity and urgency. What could be more exclusive or urgent than the harried throngs of desperate shoppers kicking down Best Buy’s doors at five in the morning? Again, it’s not the money saved that matters.
It’s the feeling of having saved — and Black Friday offers that in spades.
A recent study by the Retail Council of Canada estimates Canadians will spend $12.6 billion on the day after U.S. Thanksgiving.