anyone dumb enough to participate in the Black Friday madness is definitely too dumb to know why 1gb non-expandable storage is next to fucking worthless
It’s easy to call people “dumb enough” when you’ve flooded their ears with propaganda year after year after year.
More difficult to navigate the minefield of crap that floods retail stores and online sites or to pick out the “honest” review site from the army of influencer sales and marketing shills or to fully grasp why two seemingly identical products would have radically different sticker prices.
The opposite end of the “If it’s too good to be true…” moniker is the Velben Good. Companies are just as happy to sell you a 500x marked-up widget by spending an equivalent in native ads and other subliminal marketing. For every $40 1gb tablet in the clearance aisle there’s a $400 1gb tablet with gold leaf and a Disney celebrity’s face on the box and a dozen YouTubers/Facebookers screaming “Best In Value!” from the top of the website’s Recommended Videos page.
And none of that deals with the volume of products that straight up lie about what’s in the box. In the end, failing to step on a consumerist punji stick is as much the result of good luck as good sense.
Black Friday is such a cheap illusion.
It is the biggest sales day of the year, because its a day enormous numbers of people have off that’s in close proximity to the Christmas season. Because businesses know they’re going to see high sales volume, they have an incentive to maximize units sold at a lower average markup than their competitors.
There’s a real rational marketing logic to discounting goods (and then saturating the airwaves with marketing material) in the weeks leading up to it. But over time, the math has changed from “maximize volume of sales to generate optimal profit” into “maximize volume of advertisements to generate maximal per-unit profit margins”.
It’s easy to call people “dumb enough” when you’ve flooded their ears with propaganda year after year after year.
More difficult to navigate the minefield of crap that floods retail stores and online sites or to pick out the “honest” review site from the army of influencer sales and marketing shills or to fully grasp why two seemingly identical products would have radically different sticker prices.
The opposite end of the “If it’s too good to be true…” moniker is the Velben Good. Companies are just as happy to sell you a 500x marked-up widget by spending an equivalent in native ads and other subliminal marketing. For every $40 1gb tablet in the clearance aisle there’s a $400 1gb tablet with gold leaf and a Disney celebrity’s face on the box and a dozen YouTubers/Facebookers screaming “Best In Value!” from the top of the website’s Recommended Videos page.
And none of that deals with the volume of products that straight up lie about what’s in the box. In the end, failing to step on a consumerist punji stick is as much the result of good luck as good sense.
It is the biggest sales day of the year, because its a day enormous numbers of people have off that’s in close proximity to the Christmas season. Because businesses know they’re going to see high sales volume, they have an incentive to maximize units sold at a lower average markup than their competitors.
There’s a real rational marketing logic to discounting goods (and then saturating the airwaves with marketing material) in the weeks leading up to it. But over time, the math has changed from “maximize volume of sales to generate optimal profit” into “maximize volume of advertisements to generate maximal per-unit profit margins”.