Black Friday..Already??

So I went Christmas shopping with my roommate last week, and everywhere we looked, we felt bombarded with sales promotions.

"30% Entire Store!"
 "FREE gift (with $75 purchase)"
 "BOGO! Entire Store!"

The list went on and on. It didn't matter where we were: the mall, Target, World Market... Anyone and everyone had some sort of sale taking place, almost as if each company was saying "Well XYZ might have a sale right now too, but we're having one and you should come shop with us instead!".

Even last Sunday's paper had Black Friday ads for multiple stores. With marathons, you train really hard for quite some time beforehand in order to prepare yourself for the big day. This is also true of Black Friday; you train really hard by comparing prices on that LCD flat-screen Sony, checking to see when each store opens, how many TVs each of the stores has, etc. In reality, Black Friday is just one huge marathon that consumers spend the whole month of November training for.

We as consumers are so greedy and eager for a deal, that we'll arrive at a store at 4 a.m., push and shove a horde of strangers around, and fight to the death (sometimes literally) just to get a discount. Sure, some of these deals really are unbeatable, but why do we become so materialistic? I think this goes back to the feelings of losses and gains explained in the class-required book, Nudge. The feeling we get when we have lost out on something is almost twice as intense as the feeling we get when we gain something. This principle would explain why everyone goes into an almost frenzied state on Black Friday- if they miss out on that deal on the flat-screen, they will feel an intense sense of loss.

So just be careful this year on Black Friday when the crowds go wild in order to satisfy the potential feelings of loss and of "what could have been".