Category: Business

Scarcity Scare Tactics

Business, Marketing / Advertising, Travels

Via Insty comes this silliness:

Companies in certain sectors use the same behavioral interventions repeatedly. Hotel booking websites are one example. Their sustained, repetitive use of scarcity (e.g., “Only two rooms left!”) and social proof (“16 other people viewed this room”) messaging is apparent even to a casual browser.
For Chris the implication was clear: this “scarcity” was just a sales ploy, not to be taken seriously.

Well, duh.  The oldest advertising gimmick is to threaten shortages:  “while supplies last”, “today only”, “limited to the first 50 customers”, and so on.

I’ve used Expedia quite a bit for my international travel planning (they usually handle cancellations better than the establishments themselves do), and the “only 1 room left” warning elicits a response from me of, “Oh well… if the room disappears I’ll just have to find another hotel.”

You see, true  scarcity can and does work to drive a purchase decision — World Cup tickets being a good example because it’s one event, one time, one place — but all the artificial scarcity (as above) should get just a shrug from the prospective consumer.

Even more, if the establishment uses it constantly (e.g. Expedia), it becomes just white noise:  unless, of course, the customer is a stupid dickhead, in which case they get what they deserve.

The very best reaction to this ploy is to simply say, “Well, if I miss it this time, I’ll just find another vendor or postpone the purchase until the next sale.”  Department stores, who seem only to sell merchandise when it’s “On Sale”, have learned to their cost what happens when you turn discounted shopping into an everyday event:  people only buy during “sale” periods — which is why department stores are dying.

As for the various online travel sites:  if you do find an unbeatable deal for the hotel stay of your dreams at, say, Expedia, check the same hotel’s rates at one of the other booking sites as a backup before making your decision.  (By the way, if the deal “disappears”, try calling the hotel direct;  I once got a rate lower than Expedia’s “Great Deal” at an Edinburgh hotel during the Royal Military Tattoo Week simply by asking for it.)

And ignore the bullshit.

Wrong Direction

Business, Nannies

Now there’s this little trinket:

Amazon is selling a bracelet that gives you an electric SHOCK you when you eat too much fast food, bite your nails or spend too much time on the internet

Hmmm… I have an idea:  how about selling one of these little behavior-modification devices which is triggered when you’re spending too much time browsing the merchandise at amazon.com? 

No?

Then fuck off and die, you corporate fucking nanny pricks.  And take your little Stasi girlfriend Alexa with you to the crematorium.

Moving Trends

Business, Friends and Family, Travels

Now this came as a surprise to me:

Why Some Americans Won’t Move, Even for a Higher Salary

Apart from the Great Wetback Episode Of 1986 (emigration, for those who haven’t been paying attention), I’ve moved around the U.S. on several occasions, mostly for job reasons (better job, more money), and every one of them was wrenching.  And of course none of my moves in the U.S. was from my home town, so I can well imagine that someone who has grown up and spent most of their life in (say) Indianapolis would be reluctant to leave family, friends, business contacts and so on to start all over again in a new location.

Many people, of course, take moving as part of life (I’m excluding Armed Forces folks from this, because moving is part of the deal), and I suppose I’m probably one of them — but that’s because my first move was so comprehensive and so final, the uprooting was total.  Subsequent moves, while somewhat disturbing, were much easier by comparison.

After Connie passed away, I gave serious thought to starting all over again, not just in another town, but even in another country.  During my sabbatical travels, I discovered that the cost of living in the south of France, for example, was about the same as living here in Plano, and for the briefest moment I considered it.  I love France, always have, and with little or no language issue, that part would have been easy.  The cultural change, however, would not  have been easy, and so I didn’t move Over There.  (Interestingly enough, while I love Britain even more than France, that was never an option, because the cultural change would have been even more  pronounced.)

And finally, I realized that the urge to move, to start all over again somewhere else, was more a factor of bereavement than from any desire for change:  so I stopped considering it.

Going back to the chart, however, I am very interested in the downward trend of the phenomenon.  If we assume that when America was still an agrarian, immobile society until the Industrial Revolution caused the mass migration to cities, could it be that the beginning of the study (in the late 1940s) was simply the crest of the wave, and that people were once again preferring to remain settled than to move?

And in recent years, of course, the technology has increasingly been able to support work-from-home or work-from-home-city, so one would expect the incidence of moving to slow even more.  That said, however, if one is able to work from home, then it doesn’t really matter where home is — so people could be expected to move elsewhere to improve their standard of living, say to cheaper housing.  So what do the numbers say about that?

Even the “housing” number has been falling — and I suspect that if one were to take away migration away from high-cost areas like the Northeast and California, the trend would be even more pronounced.  Interesting indeed:  I would have assumed the precise opposite trends, from both  charts, but apparently not.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

So What?

Business

Here’s one of those wealth-envy headlines which makes me want to load up the old AK-47 and take a day trip, not to the offices of the tax-avoiding corporations, but to the offices of the Daily Mail (and not for the first time either):

Big companies avoid £100billion a year in corporate tax thanks to ‘spider’s web’ of British offshore tax havens

  • Tax Justice Network ranked 64 countries on the tax avoidance they enabled
  • UK outsourced corporate tax haven game to ‘spider’s web’ of offshore territories
  • British Virgin Islands, followed by Bermuda and the Cayman Islands topped list
  • Network said UK bears the lion’s share of responsibility for the ‘breakdown of the global corporate tax system’

Looks like the Brits are finally doing something right, because anything that breaks down the so-called “global corporate tax system” can only be A Good Thing.

Reminder to the Daily Mail:

  • Tax avoidance means not paying unnecessary taxes according to the law
  • Tax evasion means not paying the taxes you legally owe.

Then again, if I’m going to be paying an AK-enabled visit to anyone, it should be to the offices of this “Tax Justice Network” crowd.  They seem like an evil bunch of assholes.

Auctions vs. Pleasure

Business, Funny Stuff, Men & Women

It’s not often that a newspaper story leaves me convulsed with laughter, but this one did:

Red-faced auction house chiefs are forced to look for a new venue after bidders are put off by ‘screams of pleasure’ coming from swingers club upstairs

You have to read the whole thing to get the full Monty, so to speak, but I started giggling just at the thought of a staid-looking commercial building inside which both of these are going on simultaneously:

Yeah I know, I’m a sick and twisted man… and don’t even get me started on “Greedy Ladies Day”.

Hoofbeats

Business, Travels

Just when you thought commercial flying couldn’t possibly get any worse, comes this news:

JetBlue ditches Coca-Cola from its flights in favor of rival drink Pepsi

Now I have not a single dog in this fight as a.) I don’t fly JetBlue and b.) I last drank a Coca-Cola on an airliner during (I think) Ronald Reagan’s first term.  Nevertheless, from what I can remember of the taste of Pepsi-Cola (circa 1969), I can quite understand why people are getting upset.  Somebody at JetBlue was either not thinking, or else had his kids’ college tuition fees “subsidized”, if you get my drift.

Besides, I’m told that “Jack & Pepsi” sounds silly and tastes worse — and lemme tell y’all, nobody  wants to piss off Jack Daniels drinkers.  Especially at 27,000 ft.