Welcome back from Thanksgiving. Did you go out and splurge at the Black Friday sales? I didn’t—I didn’t leave the house until Sunday afternoon, and it was glorious. It only took one marathon Friday a few years ago to put me off jumping into the melee. I was shopping for myself anyway—no kids, and what I buy for my friends and parents are never the kinds of things you get standing in line outside the big chain store at 3:00 in the morning. If I’m shopping with a mission, I’m an online girl all the way.

So when I see articles like the one in the New York Times today, bemoaning how people spent $348 apiece this year, down from $360 last year, I’m not sure what to think. Of course the economy’s funky right now, and a lot of people are in mortgage crisis mode. And I’m sure the economists have adjusted for online sales since the internet isn’t exactly new now. The guy they interviewed to lend insight into those crazy consumers is saying that people came out because of the gimmicks the stores create with crazy discounts and special hours, not because they’re there to drop a lot of money.

It’s funny how people are so instinctual sometimes. Oh, they’re open at 5:00 instead of 10:00! If we aren’t there first they won’t have anything left for us to buy! Oh no! We need to be there at 4:00—no! 2:00!! As though there would be no Christmas, did we not get out to make this crazy shopping day happen. Even though, yes, there are special crazy bargain things you won’t get when you roll into the store after a lunch of leftovers, I seriously doubt you’d have gotten one of them if you’d shown up twelve hours earlier. Stores advertise loss-leader products to get people in: the rest of the stuff isn’t necessarily a bargain. When you see $30 DVD players, there aren’t innumerable cases of them, there are fifty units. But since you’re there, you might as well buy this $90 one instead.

After years of this kind of manipulation, increasing pressure, and escalating tactics of manipulating people into feeling the need to shop at the fight-or-flight level, are consumers getting tired of it? These kinds of gimmicky sales seem to be more suited to the days of Tickle Me Elmo and Furby toys with their fighting parents and eager reporters. How many years does it take for a fair proportion of shoppers to realize that they might as well stay in and shop online? Burt Flickinger, the retail consultant the Times interviewed, has a different reason. He says, “American consumers are trying to outsmart the stores and wait for desperation discounts.” That’s ascribing too much (slightly) malicious forethought to consumers.

In marketing, we hear and navigate the fast-evolving customer who often seems to outgrow a tactic as soon as we get its implementation down pat. The internet seems to be the chief giver of Darwin awards for marketing strategies. We have to adapt so quickly compared to brick and mortar stores. Consumer interest waning away from the real life version of a flashing banner ad doesn’t seem surprising to me at all. The Times said that online shopping for the big Thanksgiving weekend was 32% this year, up from 23% in 2006. They also noted that the big discount items were smaller things (mixers, for example) over last year’s flat screen televisions. As with any phenomenon, there’s more than one force at play.

What do you think about the evolving relationship between people’s online shopping attention span and their real-life shopping habits?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.