Shop Right

 

I have heard that the term Black Friday is used by Marketeers even as far as India to attract consumers. As economies got interlinked these cultural invasions are natural. In the US, many people end up spending more on products they don’t need. Yes, buying is a compulsion as noted by behavioral scientists. How did it all start: Black Friday?

The last Thursday of November is marked as Thanksgiving Day in the US. The history behind this is controversial but from the face value of it, the notion of thanking people around you or those who are part of your existence is wonderful. The Friday after Thanksgiving is marked as Black Friday for shopaholics here. There are discounts, and special merchandise to woo buyers. It’s the number game.  The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to the financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits. On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free fall and bankrupting everyone from Wall Street barons to farmers. The most commonly repeated story behind the Thanksgiving shopping-related Black Friday tradition links it to retailers. As the story goes, after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”) stores would supposedly earn a profit (“went into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, because holiday shoppers blew so much money on discounted merchandise.   This is a bit inaccurate story behind the tradition. Actually, back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only were Philly cops not able to take the day off, but they had to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. Shoplifters also took advantage of the bedlam in stores and made off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache. By 1961, “Black Friday” had caught on in Philadelphia.  The term didn’t spread to the rest of the US until the late 1980s. Then retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America’s stores finally turned a profit.  

But as I said most of us end up buying things we don’t need. Searching for an explanation for compulsive shopping, We all know that buying more new stuff is bad for the planet—the production and use of household goods and services were found to drive 60% of greenhouse gas emissions—but every time you buy something, you  get a little jolt of happiness that’s hard to give up.  All things being equal, we are predisposed to try to acquire more and more stuff and to try and work less to get it. We are, after all, evolved from blobs that survived because their networks of cells learned to repeat decisions like moving towards a tasty treat or backing away from a predator.  As per researchers, we have some 86 billion neurons, the “action cells” in the brain, that are constantly creating circuits to reinforce rewarding behavior, releasing dopamine as they do so, in order to help us learn how to get a reward. We seek out those releases in dopamine, and at the same time, learn to repeat the actions that lead to them. Our brains especially like the release of more dopamine—when we get an unexpected good reward. The good feeling associated with unexpected rewards is partly why we like shopping. People get addicted to things when the appeal of getting that new, unexpected reward doesn’t fade with time. Some scientists argue that modern society is so addicted to shopping because so many people are stuck in repetitive mind-numbing jobs—buying things is one of the few ways they are able to do something out of the ordinary. All humans are different. Some might have learned in childhood that overspending can lead to poverty, which made them thrifty even if their parents weren’t. We have learned over time that the key to survival is acquiring more resources, but the brain also has a tremendous amount of plasticity. The challenge is that our systems are designed for short-term decision-making, and curtailing our own individual consumption for the long-term health of the planet may not benefit an individual person today.   

The best way to alter the overconsumption habits that have gotten us here is not to stop buying things completely; a better solution may be to substitute new rewards for the old rewards that we know, in the long term, aren’t good.  Buying used items is an elegant substitution that could help fulfill our desire to acquire. You can buy something that’s new to you, and get that same good feeling of an unexpected reward without requiring a company to extract more resources from the earth.  The second-hand economy is developing. Repairing is in vogue. And even companies like Apple, which long resisted calls from consumer groups to allow customers to repair their devices, rather than just buy a new one, now have a Self Service Repair Store that provides repair manuals and genuine Apple parts. Creating social rewards can also help nudge more people toward behavioral change. Already, there are so-called Buy Nothing groups cropping up, forming communities to help people exchange used goods—and there’s a hashtag #BuyNothingDay circulating on social media aimed at discouraging people from shopping unnecessarily on Black Friday.