Category: Travels

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.

Back Home

Travels

Back home from our trip to New England, and New Wife is absolutely sold on the place — not to live, but to spend the odd week Down East during the summer.

I’ve been to New England (both the coast and inland) on many occasions in the past;  in fact, my very first trip to the U.S. back in Fall 1985 was to New Hampshire’s White Mountains and coastal Maine, and I’ve loved the area ever since — hence my desire to take New Wife there as part of my long-term plan to show her around the various parts of the U.S. that are not Texas.

The first couple days were cool and misty/rainy, e.g. this pic taken just outside Belfast, ME:

…and another of the Bass Harbor coastline:

…but the last three days were nothing but glorious.  Here’s one taken from our rental cottage on the Damariscotta River:

And another couple from the bridge at Southport Island:

Right-click on any to embiggen (and feel free to copy and use as wallpaper etc.).  Please forgive the pics’ imperfections:  Idiot Kim forgot his trusty Nikon and had to rely on his phone instead.  Ugh.

Finally:  while we were there, several Readers wrote to me and invited us to join them at their houses, on their boats, or for a meal/drink.  My sincere apologies for not replying to any of you:  I didn’t check my email account until last night (my vacations are pretty much that — a getaway — and much of the time we had zero connectivity anyway).  So please don’t think I was being rude.  Rest assured, the next time we go Down East, we will meet up and socialize, if the invitations are still open.  Invitations to go shooting will, as always, receive priority.

What a pleasure.  The only regret is that we missed the arrival of the tall ships during Boothbay Harbor’s Windjammer Festival.  (I think they’re scheduled to arrive there today, in fact.)

And en passant: at the KIttery Trading Post, I saw a second-hand Browning A-Bolt rifle in .300 Win Mag with a laminate (not the usual composite) stock for sale at a very  reasonable price.  I’m still kicking myself…

Sans Blade

Behind Enemy Lines, Guy Stuff

Because we flew up to New England and didn’t check any bags, I couldn’t bring a handgun or knife onto the flight because TSA [25,000-word rant deleted] and because they have some strange shitty laws about Texans carrying handguns around New England [250,000-word rant deleted].

Of course, our first full day of vacation was spent shopping in Kittery, Maine — home to a jillion outlet stores — so New Wife was well pleased to spend a morning shopping (as was I, you will see).  While she was shopping in the Ladies’ sections, I was off looking at guys’ stuff — and at Eddie Bauer, found a couple of beautiful white cotton shirts (my go-to everyday wear) at 50% off, which made them only a little more expensive than the Target / Wal-Mart equivalent, at much higher quality.  (And  made in Sri Lanka and not in China, for the win.)  Also a summer-lightweight cap from Barbour, at 70% off (making it merely expensive rather than Barbour-price i.e. nosebleed). Then it came time to remove all the price tags and such, which required cutting the little plastic loop thingy on the shirts, and a sturdy piece of string on the cap.

No knife.

Well, I wasn’t going to be put about like that, and because I’ve been to Kittery before, I went over to the giant Kittery Trading Post to buy a knife.

My original intention was really to buy a cheap $10-Made-In-China POS, then just throw it away before getting on the return flight.

Unfortunately, the Trading Post has an excellent selection of lovely knives… and you all know where this is going, right?  Here’s the rather old-fashioned Case two-blade pocket knife that followed me out of the store:

I have probably about three or four Case knives at home, and I love all of them:  they are the perfect “working” blades, and I have a soft spot for the “sheep’s foot” type (the upright one, for those unfamiliar with the term).  So for $35, I now have a(nother) decent pocket-knife, and  made in the U.S.A. withal.   And yes, it’s a fingernail-opener rather than the modern button-opener type;  don’t care.

And I’ll just have to check my bag when we fly back, because I’m not going to risk having this lovely little thing confiscated by the Airport Gestapo.

En passant:  KIttery Trading Post has an excellent selection of lightly-used second-hand rifles, so I did spend a little quite a long time browsing that aisle.  New Wife of course was shopping downstairs in the Ladies Department, so the trip ended up costing a little rather more than $35.  Don’t care about that either.  All worth it.

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.

Road Destruction Season

Drive Time, Travels

If anyone is planning a road trip in Britishland over the next 3-4 years, be warned that the Brits have released their planned scheme of major roads to be affected by construction, improvements, closures etc.  Here’s the map:

It’s been a while since I looked at a U.K. roadmap… but isn’t that map essentially ALL the major roads in Britishland?

Looks like the M6 is going to be cataclysmic;  however, as said highway leads to both Liverpool and  Glasgow, I can’t see why this would be a problem for all right-thinking drivers.

No man should.