Grant McCracken, an anthropologist and an insightful commentator on modernity, offered an intriguing quote recently about Martha Stewart:
"She's the mistress of the semiotic codes dear to the upwardly aspirational middle class… Martha's semiotics were powerful. Fresh flowers. Fresh linens. Fresh colors. And an embargo on all things unsophisticated and déclassé."
To anyone who lived through the 1990s, this quote captures Martha Stewart's brand perfectly.
Except that things change. Eras and generations change. And Martha's brand, at least in that form, simply doesn't click with the Millennial generation. Millennials don't even want to buy homes, much less fill them with fresh linens and flowers. They don't bake. Or read magazines.
But the companies out there selling to us need to keep brands like these alive, alive for as long as they can. This is done by "repositioning" and "staying relevant," both repulsive marketing terms that, to me at least, merely serve to underscore the rampant cynicism infesting the world of branding and consumer products.
As an example: Do you remember Emeril? Remember him and his show, his celebrity cookbooks and celebrity-branded cookware? Do you remember "Bam!"? Martha Stewart's company bought the entire Emeril brand, back in 2008, in a failed effort to stay relevant. Once upon a time Bam! was cool. It helped sell a lot of overpriced cookware. Now nobody remembers.
So how does "Martha Stewart" (as a brand) stay relevant, now that civilization has thankfully moved on from mansions, fresh linens and other pretensions of a lost, pre-financial crisis era? How does Martha sell--and more importantly, what does she sell--to a generation that doesn't even cook?
Back to the cynical parlance of modern media: Martha will "pivot." She'll attach her trusted name to a food delivery service.[1] She will "reposition" her brand by getting on the marijuana bandwagon, doing a bunch of campy skits with Snoop Dogg to sell you trendy cannabis products. All of which will make her "relevant" to today's consumers.
In other words, she'll do anything, literally anything, to sell to you.
Doesn't it make you feel like a sucker, having stuff like this force-fed to you? Do you enjoy being encouraged to chase one branded aspirational lifestyle in one era--only later still to see it replaced by another new, "more relevant" branded aspirational lifestyle in a later era, just so you can chase that too?
The whole thing feels like an extended elaborate joke, played on three generations of consumers.
Timeline of Martha Stewart, her brand, and her companies:
1999: Martha Stewart IPOs her company, market value reaches $1.8b
2003-4: Stewart indicted, convicted and jailed for lying under oath and obstruction of justice in connection with a suspicious sale of shares of Imclone stock, one day before Imclone collapsed in value (due to failing to receive FDA approval for the drug Erbitux).
2005: Martha's comeback: Stewart is released from prison, and over the next few years, her company announces deals to sell Martha Stewart-branded merchandise at Kmart, Macy's and JCPenney, all of which devolve into lawsuits. Later she announces deals to sell merchandise through Petsmart, Michaels and Home Depot.
2011: After serving a five year ban from public markets as part of her conviction settlement with Federal regulators, Martha Stewart rejoins her namesake company's board of directors.
2015: After years of declining ad sales, declining branding revenue and declining circulation of her various publications, Martha Stewart Omnimedia is sold to Sequential Brands [ticker: SQBG] for $350m.
2019: Sequential Brands, collapsing under a mountain of debt, firesales Martha Stewart's brand, as well as the Emeril Legasse brand, for a mere $175 million, [2] less than half what they paid for it just four years earlier, and less than one-tenth of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's peak valuation. Sequential Brands now trades at penny-stock levels, at approximately 50c a share.
2019: Martha Stewart announces a deal with Canopy Growth Company, a Canada-based cannabis company, to market a line of cannabis supplements and other pot-infused wellness products for pets.
Footnotes:
[1] It's hard not to notice the rich irony of Martha Stewart's meal delivery service brand using the slogan "recipes from America's most trusted home cook." As if calling your meal delivery service "home cooking" actually makes it so.
[2] Get ready: now yet another company will likely be ramming a pivoted and repositioned Martha and Emeril in our faces all over again.
READ NEXT: Aspirational Marketing and the Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Showing posts with label Understanding the Consumer Products Industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Understanding the Consumer Products Industry. Show all posts
Big Grocery Stores + Decision Fatigue = Sticky Consumers
I stumbled onto an interesting post last week remarking on the tediousness of navigating a new 30,000 item grocery store and figuring out where everything is.
Decision fatigue is a real thing, and--if I'm any evidence--it's one of the reasons I hate going to new grocery stores. We got a new Wegmans in our part of New Jersey recently, and as much as I love that grocery store chain (this is something perhaps only people from Upstate New York can truly understand), I don't want to change to a new store.
Why? Because it's incredibly time-consuming, annoying, and vaguely stressful to "learn" a new store.
Hmmmm. Maybe that's part of the game.
An important idea in marketing is the concept of stickiness: the idea that it's not enough just to win a customer. You have to keep that customer, keep them coming back.
In the corporate world, companies will do all kinds of things to keep customers sticky. They'll use periodic discounting, branding, associative advertising and all kind of other techniques to keep our buying behavior as habitual as possible. In my old Wall Street career, every company would brag about how sticky their customers were, while laughing about how easily they could manipulate and play their suppliers off each other. In other words, their customers were always sticky, but whenever they themselves were customers, they weren't sticky at all. Always manipulating, never manipulated.
The point here is that sticky customer is a manipulated customer. There's a lesson in there for us as consumers.
Well, I now realize, with my typical window-licking slowness, that the complexity of a big store is yet another factor that makes us into sticky customers. Customers do not want to have to learn an entirely new grocery store. They don't want to spend time wandering around looking for items, and waste weeks--or even months--of grocery store trips acclimating to a new product geography. Just like buying a given consumer product or even a given brand is largely a habit-based decision, going to the same store and knowing where everything is likewise is based on habit, and it keeps us going to the same store. It keeps us sticky. And it keeps us coming back.
Except that truly empowered consumers don't want to be sticky! We want to be brand disloyal, able to switch stores and brands based on our needs, not theirs. We want companies to compete for our consumer dollars, and we want to buy our items when we see the prices we desire to pay.
But I haven't figured out a solution to the "big store" problem, not yet.
READ NEXT: When Things Don't Make Sense
AND: Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You
*********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Decision fatigue is a real thing, and--if I'm any evidence--it's one of the reasons I hate going to new grocery stores. We got a new Wegmans in our part of New Jersey recently, and as much as I love that grocery store chain (this is something perhaps only people from Upstate New York can truly understand), I don't want to change to a new store.
Why? Because it's incredibly time-consuming, annoying, and vaguely stressful to "learn" a new store.
Hmmmm. Maybe that's part of the game.
An important idea in marketing is the concept of stickiness: the idea that it's not enough just to win a customer. You have to keep that customer, keep them coming back.
In the corporate world, companies will do all kinds of things to keep customers sticky. They'll use periodic discounting, branding, associative advertising and all kind of other techniques to keep our buying behavior as habitual as possible. In my old Wall Street career, every company would brag about how sticky their customers were, while laughing about how easily they could manipulate and play their suppliers off each other. In other words, their customers were always sticky, but whenever they themselves were customers, they weren't sticky at all. Always manipulating, never manipulated.
The point here is that sticky customer is a manipulated customer. There's a lesson in there for us as consumers.
Well, I now realize, with my typical window-licking slowness, that the complexity of a big store is yet another factor that makes us into sticky customers. Customers do not want to have to learn an entirely new grocery store. They don't want to spend time wandering around looking for items, and waste weeks--or even months--of grocery store trips acclimating to a new product geography. Just like buying a given consumer product or even a given brand is largely a habit-based decision, going to the same store and knowing where everything is likewise is based on habit, and it keeps us going to the same store. It keeps us sticky. And it keeps us coming back.
Except that truly empowered consumers don't want to be sticky! We want to be brand disloyal, able to switch stores and brands based on our needs, not theirs. We want companies to compete for our consumer dollars, and we want to buy our items when we see the prices we desire to pay.
But I haven't figured out a solution to the "big store" problem, not yet.
READ NEXT: When Things Don't Make Sense
AND: Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You
*********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Triggered to Pay Extra
There's a new field of battle in the chess game between consumers vs the companies who sell to us. Have you noticed how easily consumers fall for words like:
Sustainable
Ethical
Green
Baby-Friendly
Chemical-Free
These words are magical. All you have to do is wave a few of them in front of consumers and they instantly say "Ooh, ooh! Can I pay extra?"
We're teaching a brand new generation of consumers to respond autonomically to any premium-priced product containing any of these words.
So what company then wouldn't use these words? Words are free! You can as many of them as you want, in any order, anywhere on the package, and you can trigger a meaningful percentage of consumers to pay more for product. Often significantly more.
This reminds me of a post I wrote years ago about a bar of extra ethical chocolate I received which used these types of words, along with photos of smiling women meant to represent definitely-not-exploited members of a Bolivia-based cocoa cooperative.
What was shallow and deeply cynical about this chocolate was that you could easily see from the fine print on the label that most of the ingredients came from totally different countries from where this cooperative was, and worse, all the high-value, highly profitable work--the making of the chocolate itself--was done in Switzerland, thousands of miles away. For all we know the smiling, definitely-not-exploited laborer on the package could have been a stock photo.
With all this in mind, an empowered consumer has to consider a few things. Such as:
1) If a company uses a word on a label, does that make it true?
2) What do these words really mean? ("Chemical-free" would be a good place to start.)
3) Are these words really any different from vacuous marketing words from prior generations, like "heart-healthy" or one of my personal favorites: "a good source of seven vitamins and minerals"?
4) Have you ever seen a product with marketing copy that said "Unsustainable" or "Unethical" or "Baby-Unfriendly"?
And finally:
5) What price premium are you willing to pay for words? Will you pay double? Triple? Quadruple? Where is your limit?
Readers, what do you think?
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Sustainable
Ethical
Green
Baby-Friendly
Chemical-Free
These words are magical. All you have to do is wave a few of them in front of consumers and they instantly say "Ooh, ooh! Can I pay extra?"
We're teaching a brand new generation of consumers to respond autonomically to any premium-priced product containing any of these words.
So what company then wouldn't use these words? Words are free! You can as many of them as you want, in any order, anywhere on the package, and you can trigger a meaningful percentage of consumers to pay more for product. Often significantly more.
This reminds me of a post I wrote years ago about a bar of extra ethical chocolate I received which used these types of words, along with photos of smiling women meant to represent definitely-not-exploited members of a Bolivia-based cocoa cooperative.
What was shallow and deeply cynical about this chocolate was that you could easily see from the fine print on the label that most of the ingredients came from totally different countries from where this cooperative was, and worse, all the high-value, highly profitable work--the making of the chocolate itself--was done in Switzerland, thousands of miles away. For all we know the smiling, definitely-not-exploited laborer on the package could have been a stock photo.
With all this in mind, an empowered consumer has to consider a few things. Such as:
1) If a company uses a word on a label, does that make it true?
2) What do these words really mean? ("Chemical-free" would be a good place to start.)
3) Are these words really any different from vacuous marketing words from prior generations, like "heart-healthy" or one of my personal favorites: "a good source of seven vitamins and minerals"?
4) Have you ever seen a product with marketing copy that said "Unsustainable" or "Unethical" or "Baby-Unfriendly"?
And finally:
5) What price premium are you willing to pay for words? Will you pay double? Triple? Quadruple? Where is your limit?
Readers, what do you think?
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
If Companies Can, They Will
A follow up thought from last week’s post, which I began with a truism: If companies can hike prices, they will.
We can extend and broaden this truism if we want to:
If companies can do anything, they will.
This includes irritating things like discontinuing or changing a product that you like, ending maintenance or support services for a product you’ve already bought, buying out a competitor’s product and discontinuing it, forcing product upgrades[1], and so on. They can do all these things… in addition to pulling typical garden-variety stunts like putting in stealth price hikes.
Average consumers[2] tend to have a common response to these things: they get angry, they complain, they shake their fists, and they whine about how greedy corporations put profits before people, etc. And then they call on a parent figure (usually “the government”) to “do something” about it.[3]
These reactions are understandable, but effete. Truly empowered consumers do not bother to ineffectually shake their fists at some company. Instead, they go Bill Belichick on that company! They get cold, rational, solution-minded and creative. And they beat that company at its own game by finding alternatives and substitutes for the products that these companies sell. Our goal here is to understand the greater chess game being played around us so we can navigate it as effectively as possible.
It’s a pointless, unprofitable and effete exercise to impotently shake your fist at whatever latest greedy thing whatever greedy company did. Stop buying.
Footnotes:
[1] Technology companies are the worst offenders here. A typical example would be Microsoft rolling out increasingly complex operating systems that slowed down computer performance, which drove consumers to upgrade to new computers, after which Microsoft would roll out a still more bloated operating system, driving yet another upgrade cycle, etc. In the 1990s, cynical computer industry observers used to say that Microsoft sold “bloatware,” not software. Fortunately, today’s computer buyer has more options, and can now choose among various free operating systems (e.g., Chrome, Linux), and this has devastated Microsoft’s formerly dominant market position. They had it coming.
[2] But not Casual Kitchen readers of course.
[3] Even worse, they do any or all of these things on Twitter, a place where no one has ever listened, ever. The online equivalent of screaming in your car.
*********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
We can extend and broaden this truism if we want to:
If companies can do anything, they will.
This includes irritating things like discontinuing or changing a product that you like, ending maintenance or support services for a product you’ve already bought, buying out a competitor’s product and discontinuing it, forcing product upgrades[1], and so on. They can do all these things… in addition to pulling typical garden-variety stunts like putting in stealth price hikes.
Average consumers[2] tend to have a common response to these things: they get angry, they complain, they shake their fists, and they whine about how greedy corporations put profits before people, etc. And then they call on a parent figure (usually “the government”) to “do something” about it.[3]
These reactions are understandable, but effete. Truly empowered consumers do not bother to ineffectually shake their fists at some company. Instead, they go Bill Belichick on that company! They get cold, rational, solution-minded and creative. And they beat that company at its own game by finding alternatives and substitutes for the products that these companies sell. Our goal here is to understand the greater chess game being played around us so we can navigate it as effectively as possible.
It’s a pointless, unprofitable and effete exercise to impotently shake your fist at whatever latest greedy thing whatever greedy company did. Stop buying.
Footnotes:
[1] Technology companies are the worst offenders here. A typical example would be Microsoft rolling out increasingly complex operating systems that slowed down computer performance, which drove consumers to upgrade to new computers, after which Microsoft would roll out a still more bloated operating system, driving yet another upgrade cycle, etc. In the 1990s, cynical computer industry observers used to say that Microsoft sold “bloatware,” not software. Fortunately, today’s computer buyer has more options, and can now choose among various free operating systems (e.g., Chrome, Linux), and this has devastated Microsoft’s formerly dominant market position. They had it coming.
[2] But not Casual Kitchen readers of course.
[3] Even worse, they do any or all of these things on Twitter, a place where no one has ever listened, ever. The online equivalent of screaming in your car.
*********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Noticing and Optionality as Defense Against Price Increases
A truism about prices and consumer products companies:
If a company can raise prices... it will.
Companies are always on the lookout for circumstances where they can raise prices. And they especially like circumstances where the consumer:
a) doesn't notice, or
b) doesn't have a choice.
Doesn't notice
When I say "the consumer doesn't notice" what do I mean? I'll explain with a hypothetical price-hiking tactic. Consider your basic Kraft brand salad dressing at $2.49 for a 16-ounce jar. Kraft decides to roll out a new, "upmarket" brand extension (for example, an "organic" or "natural" salad dressing) at a price point as much as 30-50% higher than the regular product. They market this product aggressively, paying for prominent shelf locations, signs, special displays, and so on, as Kraft attempts to position this salad dressing as a high end product.
Now, this creates a subtle "pricing umbrella"--for Kraft's regular brand, but for all other brands too. Even the store brand! Each of these brands now have room to raise their prices at least another 10-15%, to a point where they are still comfortably cheaper than the high-end brand.
Yet to a non-noticing, non-attentive consumer, all these products seeeeem less expensive, even though they're not. Voila! A price hike that consumers don't really even see. Because we notice relative differences much more easily than absolute differences, a new high-end or aspirational product can improve pricing dynamics for the entire product category. This is how pricing umbrellas work. And it goes without saying that consumers who "don't notice" don't even realize they're being fooled.
Doesn't have a choice
Let's move on to the second case: where consumers can't do anything about a price hike, even if they do notice. So, for the sake of argument, let's say (for some bizarre reason) you have undying brand loyalty to Kraft brand salad dressing. You simply refuse to buy anything else.
Well, you're pretty much screwed. And it's because of your "loyalty" to a brand that doesn't care about you, that doesn't even know you exist, and that sees you as a mere mark for future price hikes. You're stuck. You have to eat any increase in prices.
You can maybe hold off on buying until you see an attractive sale price (see last week's post for more on this), but you don't know when or to what extent the company actually will discount, if at all. At the end of the day, you're gonna eat a price hike. This is why brand loyalty is toxic to consumers.
Of course, I'm using salad dressing as an example in this post for reasons of rhetoric (and metaphor, as we'll soon see). After all, a flexible, empowered, open-minded reader who hears the words "Kraft salad dressing" and "price hike" in the same sentence will instantly begin reeling off solutions, substitutions and alternatives. To most readers here at Casual Kitchen the idea of buying salad dressing at all, much less a branded salad dressing (and much, much, much less an overpriced upmarket "aspirational" salad dressing) would be a ridiculous, even vaguely pathetic act. Especially in light of how easy it is to make inexpensive (and far more healthy) salad dressings at home.
Therefore, any reader here should easily be able to arrive at multiple solutions to subvert any price hike anywhere in this entire genre of products.
Okay. Salad dressing is easy. With other products it can be more difficult. Obviously. But the point is to try and think of any product, regardless of what it is, as if it were "salad dressing" in order to help your brain generate alternatives.
Really, it doesn't matter whether it's salad dressing, airline tickets, cars, houses or ...yachts. You want to make it so that all providers of all products have to compete--on multiple, multiple levels--in order to win your business.
And yeah, I know: one one level, salad dressing doesn't really matter. Nobody changes their standard of living by beating price hikes in the salad dressing aisle. But you will change your standard of living if you can employ these concepts in other life domains and with other, much bigger-ticket items.
If there are competing products in the same store, great. If not, make them them compete "temporally" by holding off on your buying until you see a truly attractive sale price. Invoke competition from other retailers, from online retailers, and so on.
Finally, when all else fails, make them compete with a truly out of the box solution. (Examples: make the product yourself at home, use the "don't want it" heuristic, find a truly original substitutive solution, etc.) Force these guys to compete for your business on multiple, multiple levels, and you will reclaim most of your power and resist any pricing games they play.
Remember: if you don't have options you are toast. You'll be beholden to some retailer or some company and all their sneaky, creepy pricing tactics.
******************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
If a company can raise prices... it will.
Companies are always on the lookout for circumstances where they can raise prices. And they especially like circumstances where the consumer:
a) doesn't notice, or
b) doesn't have a choice.
Doesn't notice
When I say "the consumer doesn't notice" what do I mean? I'll explain with a hypothetical price-hiking tactic. Consider your basic Kraft brand salad dressing at $2.49 for a 16-ounce jar. Kraft decides to roll out a new, "upmarket" brand extension (for example, an "organic" or "natural" salad dressing) at a price point as much as 30-50% higher than the regular product. They market this product aggressively, paying for prominent shelf locations, signs, special displays, and so on, as Kraft attempts to position this salad dressing as a high end product.
Now, this creates a subtle "pricing umbrella"--for Kraft's regular brand, but for all other brands too. Even the store brand! Each of these brands now have room to raise their prices at least another 10-15%, to a point where they are still comfortably cheaper than the high-end brand.
Yet to a non-noticing, non-attentive consumer, all these products seeeeem less expensive, even though they're not. Voila! A price hike that consumers don't really even see. Because we notice relative differences much more easily than absolute differences, a new high-end or aspirational product can improve pricing dynamics for the entire product category. This is how pricing umbrellas work. And it goes without saying that consumers who "don't notice" don't even realize they're being fooled.
Doesn't have a choice
Let's move on to the second case: where consumers can't do anything about a price hike, even if they do notice. So, for the sake of argument, let's say (for some bizarre reason) you have undying brand loyalty to Kraft brand salad dressing. You simply refuse to buy anything else.
Well, you're pretty much screwed. And it's because of your "loyalty" to a brand that doesn't care about you, that doesn't even know you exist, and that sees you as a mere mark for future price hikes. You're stuck. You have to eat any increase in prices.
You can maybe hold off on buying until you see an attractive sale price (see last week's post for more on this), but you don't know when or to what extent the company actually will discount, if at all. At the end of the day, you're gonna eat a price hike. This is why brand loyalty is toxic to consumers.
Of course, I'm using salad dressing as an example in this post for reasons of rhetoric (and metaphor, as we'll soon see). After all, a flexible, empowered, open-minded reader who hears the words "Kraft salad dressing" and "price hike" in the same sentence will instantly begin reeling off solutions, substitutions and alternatives. To most readers here at Casual Kitchen the idea of buying salad dressing at all, much less a branded salad dressing (and much, much, much less an overpriced upmarket "aspirational" salad dressing) would be a ridiculous, even vaguely pathetic act. Especially in light of how easy it is to make inexpensive (and far more healthy) salad dressings at home.
Therefore, any reader here should easily be able to arrive at multiple solutions to subvert any price hike anywhere in this entire genre of products.
Okay. Salad dressing is easy. With other products it can be more difficult. Obviously. But the point is to try and think of any product, regardless of what it is, as if it were "salad dressing" in order to help your brain generate alternatives.
Really, it doesn't matter whether it's salad dressing, airline tickets, cars, houses or ...yachts. You want to make it so that all providers of all products have to compete--on multiple, multiple levels--in order to win your business.
And yeah, I know: one one level, salad dressing doesn't really matter. Nobody changes their standard of living by beating price hikes in the salad dressing aisle. But you will change your standard of living if you can employ these concepts in other life domains and with other, much bigger-ticket items.
If there are competing products in the same store, great. If not, make them them compete "temporally" by holding off on your buying until you see a truly attractive sale price. Invoke competition from other retailers, from online retailers, and so on.
Finally, when all else fails, make them compete with a truly out of the box solution. (Examples: make the product yourself at home, use the "don't want it" heuristic, find a truly original substitutive solution, etc.) Force these guys to compete for your business on multiple, multiple levels, and you will reclaim most of your power and resist any pricing games they play.
Remember: if you don't have options you are toast. You'll be beholden to some retailer or some company and all their sneaky, creepy pricing tactics.
******************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
How Prices are Changing in Your Grocery Store, and Why This One Frugality Hack No Longer Works
Something has changed in the grocery store pricing environment. And it's not just prices rising (which they are, across the board in almost all food categories).
What we're also seeing is a fundamental change in the way things are priced relative to each other, and it's ruining one of the key grocery store hacks frugal shoppers have used for years.
What's the fundamental change? It used to be that store-brand products always sold at meaningful discounts to branded products. Not any more. And so, one of the easiest ways to save money food shopping--switching from the branded to the generic product--no longer works as well as it used to.
The backstory
Consumers were a lot better behaved twenty years ago. They didn't change brands often. So, to induce the typical consumer to even consider buying a store brand or generic product, the store had to offer a really juicy price. The price discount had to be huge.
Remember, this was back when companies actually made things, and when there (sometimes) used to be an actual difference between branded and unbranded products. Not so much any more. Furthermore, if you've read any of Casual Kitchen's posts on branding, you're well aware that, today, many consumer products brands don't actually make the products they're known for. They instead outsource it to other third party food manufacturers.
Not only that, but often those third party manufacturers make not only the branded item, but the store brand product too. Often in the very same factory. And those two products sit right next to each other on the store shelf, differentiated by absolutely nothing but price. [For a depressing and highly typical example, see CK's article on commodity canned tuna.]
Consumers, especially the ones who didn't enjoy getting separated from their money for no reason, caught on to this game. They stopped playing checkers and started playing chess. When you figure out to your dismay that the only difference between a branded product and a store brand product is a label and a 30-50% higher price, you won't just consider the store brand, you'll buy it. From now on. What kind of fool would do otherwise?
Add in some inflation
There's one more step in this discussion. We're now in a more inflationary environment than we were just a few years ago. Prices are starting to rise across many grocery store categories. But here's what's unusual in today's pricing environment: while many branded products have hiked their prices, store brands have hiked their prices even more. Now, the pricing differential between branded and generic items is a lot smaller than it was. Instead of discounts of 30% or more, you might see discounts of as little as 5-10%.
I'll share an example. Over the past couple of years, Planters brand nuts has put in meaningful price hikes to the point where (in grocery stores in our area) their standard 1-lb jar of peanuts now costs up to $4.29. The store brand in my store responded to this "pricing umbella" by raising their standard price to $3.99, a mere 7% discount. Yes, both have raised prices, but the store brand raised its price more, and now the store band offers far less of a discount to the branded product than before.
Another example. Store brand analgesics (aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen) now are priced at a smaller than ever discount to branded analgesics, with discounts of only 10-15%. Previously you could buy store brand painkillers for sometimes half the price of branded Tylenol or Advil. And because these products have to be identical in every way by law, this was the easiest, most entry-level frugality hack in all of consumer products.
As a matter of fact, with some products, the generic/branded pricing differential has gotten so tiny that you can sometimes find a branded product offered at a temporary "on-sale" price that's actually less than the store brand product! Grocery store reality seems totally upside down when this happens. More on this in two paragraphs.
You can only push consumers so far
Finally, you can only push prices so far before consumers push back. In many food categories, companies and grocery stores are discovering to their dismay that they hurt sales by ramming through big price hikes, as consumers adjust by finding substitutes or buying less. Then, to win those buyers back, consumer products companies rely on discounting, sales and couponing.
Here's a somewhat ludicrous example of this from the packaged cookie aisle: after years and years of price hikes and stealth price hikes (keeping the price the same but offering fewer cookies per box, one of the most annoying tactics out there), it feels ridiculous to pay $6.00 or more for a box of some 17 Oreo DoubleStuff cookies, a quantity of cookies I could easily inhale in one sitting. Apparently many consumers agree with me (maybe not about the inhaling part, but definitely about the price), and in my grocery store, these cookies are frequently offered at half off. Half!
So, let me offer readers a thought experiment. What really is the price of Oreos?
Obviously, for a non-savvy, non-flexible customer who must have her Oreos on the exact day she happens to shop… that day's price is the price, however high it happens to be.
For the rest of us, however, we easily defeat these pricing games by shopping opportunistically, and never paying full price for anything, ever. Ever! Unless something is offered at a highly desirable, on-sale price, we. don't. buy. Here's where a savvy consumer separates herself from the pack.
Or! An even savvier, self-reliant consumer can always use the Don't want it! technique and not buy Oreos at all. After all, a batch of homemade cookies--made with love from laughably cheap commodity pantry items--will taste far better and cost far less.
And because learning to make delicious food at home is an inherently good skill, and because working on this skill improves your independence, flexibility and self-sufficiency, doing so will bring you far more satisfaction than overpaying for some flimsy, pathetic plastic container of 17 lousy Oreos.
So what's the takeaway here? First, all of this goes to show, yet again, who has ultimate power in this business environment. We consumers do. We are the ones who willingly decide whether or not to pick the product up off the shelf, carry it over to the checkout counter, and fish money out of our pockets to pay. By definition, companies cannot sell us products at any price unless they offer sufficient value to us such that we decide to buy.
The minute we say no and don't buy... they start discounting. Then we buy.
The consumer products marketplace is changing, it's evolving, as companies seek ways to maintain their profitability in an increasingly uncertain retailing environment. Some of our favorite frugality techniques still work, but some aren't working quite as well as they used to. We have to stay flexible, independent and opportunistic.
READ NEXT: Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers (An Accidental, Secret Recipe for Massive Web Traffic)
AND: Nine Terrible Ways to Make Choices
*****************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
What we're also seeing is a fundamental change in the way things are priced relative to each other, and it's ruining one of the key grocery store hacks frugal shoppers have used for years.
What's the fundamental change? It used to be that store-brand products always sold at meaningful discounts to branded products. Not any more. And so, one of the easiest ways to save money food shopping--switching from the branded to the generic product--no longer works as well as it used to.
The backstory
Consumers were a lot better behaved twenty years ago. They didn't change brands often. So, to induce the typical consumer to even consider buying a store brand or generic product, the store had to offer a really juicy price. The price discount had to be huge.
Remember, this was back when companies actually made things, and when there (sometimes) used to be an actual difference between branded and unbranded products. Not so much any more. Furthermore, if you've read any of Casual Kitchen's posts on branding, you're well aware that, today, many consumer products brands don't actually make the products they're known for. They instead outsource it to other third party food manufacturers.
Not only that, but often those third party manufacturers make not only the branded item, but the store brand product too. Often in the very same factory. And those two products sit right next to each other on the store shelf, differentiated by absolutely nothing but price. [For a depressing and highly typical example, see CK's article on commodity canned tuna.]
Consumers, especially the ones who didn't enjoy getting separated from their money for no reason, caught on to this game. They stopped playing checkers and started playing chess. When you figure out to your dismay that the only difference between a branded product and a store brand product is a label and a 30-50% higher price, you won't just consider the store brand, you'll buy it. From now on. What kind of fool would do otherwise?
Add in some inflation
There's one more step in this discussion. We're now in a more inflationary environment than we were just a few years ago. Prices are starting to rise across many grocery store categories. But here's what's unusual in today's pricing environment: while many branded products have hiked their prices, store brands have hiked their prices even more. Now, the pricing differential between branded and generic items is a lot smaller than it was. Instead of discounts of 30% or more, you might see discounts of as little as 5-10%.
I'll share an example. Over the past couple of years, Planters brand nuts has put in meaningful price hikes to the point where (in grocery stores in our area) their standard 1-lb jar of peanuts now costs up to $4.29. The store brand in my store responded to this "pricing umbella" by raising their standard price to $3.99, a mere 7% discount. Yes, both have raised prices, but the store brand raised its price more, and now the store band offers far less of a discount to the branded product than before.
Another example. Store brand analgesics (aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen) now are priced at a smaller than ever discount to branded analgesics, with discounts of only 10-15%. Previously you could buy store brand painkillers for sometimes half the price of branded Tylenol or Advil. And because these products have to be identical in every way by law, this was the easiest, most entry-level frugality hack in all of consumer products.
As a matter of fact, with some products, the generic/branded pricing differential has gotten so tiny that you can sometimes find a branded product offered at a temporary "on-sale" price that's actually less than the store brand product! Grocery store reality seems totally upside down when this happens. More on this in two paragraphs.
You can only push consumers so far
Finally, you can only push prices so far before consumers push back. In many food categories, companies and grocery stores are discovering to their dismay that they hurt sales by ramming through big price hikes, as consumers adjust by finding substitutes or buying less. Then, to win those buyers back, consumer products companies rely on discounting, sales and couponing.
Here's a somewhat ludicrous example of this from the packaged cookie aisle: after years and years of price hikes and stealth price hikes (keeping the price the same but offering fewer cookies per box, one of the most annoying tactics out there), it feels ridiculous to pay $6.00 or more for a box of some 17 Oreo DoubleStuff cookies, a quantity of cookies I could easily inhale in one sitting. Apparently many consumers agree with me (maybe not about the inhaling part, but definitely about the price), and in my grocery store, these cookies are frequently offered at half off. Half!
So, let me offer readers a thought experiment. What really is the price of Oreos?
Obviously, for a non-savvy, non-flexible customer who must have her Oreos on the exact day she happens to shop… that day's price is the price, however high it happens to be.
For the rest of us, however, we easily defeat these pricing games by shopping opportunistically, and never paying full price for anything, ever. Ever! Unless something is offered at a highly desirable, on-sale price, we. don't. buy. Here's where a savvy consumer separates herself from the pack.
Or! An even savvier, self-reliant consumer can always use the Don't want it! technique and not buy Oreos at all. After all, a batch of homemade cookies--made with love from laughably cheap commodity pantry items--will taste far better and cost far less.
And because learning to make delicious food at home is an inherently good skill, and because working on this skill improves your independence, flexibility and self-sufficiency, doing so will bring you far more satisfaction than overpaying for some flimsy, pathetic plastic container of 17 lousy Oreos.
So what's the takeaway here? First, all of this goes to show, yet again, who has ultimate power in this business environment. We consumers do. We are the ones who willingly decide whether or not to pick the product up off the shelf, carry it over to the checkout counter, and fish money out of our pockets to pay. By definition, companies cannot sell us products at any price unless they offer sufficient value to us such that we decide to buy.
The minute we say no and don't buy... they start discounting. Then we buy.
The consumer products marketplace is changing, it's evolving, as companies seek ways to maintain their profitability in an increasingly uncertain retailing environment. Some of our favorite frugality techniques still work, but some aren't working quite as well as they used to. We have to stay flexible, independent and opportunistic.
READ NEXT: Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers (An Accidental, Secret Recipe for Massive Web Traffic)
AND: Nine Terrible Ways to Make Choices
*****************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Status Signals All the Way Down
At every socioeconomic level there are choices set out for us.
At lower income or entry-level socioeconomic tiers there are choices like these:
Should I buy Tide detergent? Or should I buy All at a 40% lower price point?
Should I buy regular chicken or pay double for organic, free-range, cruelty-free chicken?
As you work your way up the socioeconomic ladder, the questions change shape a little bit:
Should I buy another Honda Civic, or am I ready to step up to a BMW? Or am I the kind of distinctive person who drives an Audi, or a Jaguar?
At still higher socioeconomic levels you can ask yourself things like:
Should I live in Summit, NJ or am really a Basking Ridge kind of person?
Should I send my child to private school? Should I consider Hotchkiss or Choate?
Should I consider the Rolex? Or am I ready for the Patek Philippe?
No matter how high you go, these aspirational questions never end.
Should buy a pied-Ã -terre in SoHo, or on the Upper East Side?
Should I winter in Miami? Or Turks and Caicos? Or Buenos Aires? After all I'm quite an international person.
It shouldn't surprise us to find aspirational tiers for megayachts, private jets and major professional sports teams. Remember: billionaires like Larry Ellison and Paul Allen are status-signalling primates too.
As you read though this post, it’s entirely possible that these choices quickly begin to sound ridiculous to a person who happens to be far removed, socioeconomically speaking, from the upper tiers.
Then again: do you think a wealthy person cares about the type of detergent they buy? These "games" appear ridiculous from both angles.
And yet people still believe they need to make whatever choices there are at their level. And, worse, as we move up the ladder (if we are fortunate enough to do so), we effortlessly start to make decisions that used to seem ridiculous, but somehow don't any more because our brains adjust so easily to new levels of wealth, comfort and status.
Now, if you play the money game right and save and invest properly over the course of your life, rest assured: you will be facing decisions at tiers far above where you are now.
The question is, will you make these decisions from a place of self-awareness? Will you understand the greater game being played around you that structures these endless signals, these endless aspirational products? Or will you be a checkers player, obediently and enthusiastically choosing the Patek Philippe watch when it's your turn to do so?
Eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll recognize that a system has set out the frame, the structure, of these choices across your whole life. This system "allows" you to make a series of choices from a series of pre-set menus.
Once you realize these are all pre-chewed choices that aren’t really choices at all, you escape the system. You start avoiding making these decisions at all, saving you time, mental effort... and an absolute shit-ton of money. Ironically, this simply accelerates your move up the socioeconomic ladder.
The only way to win this game is not to play.
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
At lower income or entry-level socioeconomic tiers there are choices like these:
Should I buy Tide detergent? Or should I buy All at a 40% lower price point?
Should I buy regular chicken or pay double for organic, free-range, cruelty-free chicken?
As you work your way up the socioeconomic ladder, the questions change shape a little bit:
Should I buy another Honda Civic, or am I ready to step up to a BMW? Or am I the kind of distinctive person who drives an Audi, or a Jaguar?
At still higher socioeconomic levels you can ask yourself things like:
Should I live in Summit, NJ or am really a Basking Ridge kind of person?
Should I send my child to private school? Should I consider Hotchkiss or Choate?
Should I consider the Rolex? Or am I ready for the Patek Philippe?
No matter how high you go, these aspirational questions never end.
Should buy a pied-Ã -terre in SoHo, or on the Upper East Side?
Should I winter in Miami? Or Turks and Caicos? Or Buenos Aires? After all I'm quite an international person.
It shouldn't surprise us to find aspirational tiers for megayachts, private jets and major professional sports teams. Remember: billionaires like Larry Ellison and Paul Allen are status-signalling primates too.
As you read though this post, it’s entirely possible that these choices quickly begin to sound ridiculous to a person who happens to be far removed, socioeconomically speaking, from the upper tiers.
Then again: do you think a wealthy person cares about the type of detergent they buy? These "games" appear ridiculous from both angles.
And yet people still believe they need to make whatever choices there are at their level. And, worse, as we move up the ladder (if we are fortunate enough to do so), we effortlessly start to make decisions that used to seem ridiculous, but somehow don't any more because our brains adjust so easily to new levels of wealth, comfort and status.
Now, if you play the money game right and save and invest properly over the course of your life, rest assured: you will be facing decisions at tiers far above where you are now.
The question is, will you make these decisions from a place of self-awareness? Will you understand the greater game being played around you that structures these endless signals, these endless aspirational products? Or will you be a checkers player, obediently and enthusiastically choosing the Patek Philippe watch when it's your turn to do so?
Eventually, if you’re lucky, you’ll recognize that a system has set out the frame, the structure, of these choices across your whole life. This system "allows" you to make a series of choices from a series of pre-set menus.
Once you realize these are all pre-chewed choices that aren’t really choices at all, you escape the system. You start avoiding making these decisions at all, saving you time, mental effort... and an absolute shit-ton of money. Ironically, this simply accelerates your move up the socioeconomic ladder.
The only way to win this game is not to play.
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Four Frugality Heuristics [That Will Make You Rich If You Use Them]
Frugality tips are nice, but frugality heuristics are better.
Heuristics--rules of thumb--let you function on a strategy level rather than on a mere tactical level. A few well-thought-out heuristics can take the place of a million specific tips and tactics.
Look, we know retailers and consumer products companies become more and more sophisticated by the day in persuading us, manipulating us and extracting money from us. It is my hope that today's post will help you avoid most, if not all, of the traps and pitfalls awaiting us in the consumer marketplace.
Frugality Heuristic #1: Don't use money to solve problems.
This rule helps you consider alternatives to solving a given need without automatically defaulting to the marketplace to make a purchase. If it's an item you need: could you borrow it, freecycle it, or use something you already own? If it's a service, can you learn to do it yourself, or trade/barter for it? Better still, can you just "don't want!" it? And so on. Bonus: by using this heuristic over the long term, you'll build enormous adaptability, flexibility and resourcefulness.
Frugality Heuristic #2: If they're offering it to you, it's profitable for them--and unprofitable for you.
Notice that things are sold to you if and only if it's worth doing so. It must be meaningfully profitable to the entity doing the selling. Faithfully using this heuristic will protect you from products and services like extended warranties, upsells, excess insurance, most high-fee investment products[1], etc.
Frugality Heuristic #3: If it's advertised, you don't want it.
Remember: You the consumer pay for all advertising. Ad costs are always passed through to the end customer in the form of higher prices, yet despite this, the advertising-consumption model is perhaps one of the best systems ever devised for triggering desires and then separating us from our money. Do not play this game. At the very least, find an equivalent product that isn't advertised. A savvy and intelligent consumer thinks about the enormous cost of heavy advertising, knows that she ends up paying for it, and thus lets advertising become a stimulus not to buy.
Frugality Heuristic #4: Avoid all payment plans.
Payment plans obscure the true price you pay for something, and they almost always substantially increase your final cost[2] while substantially increasing profits to the company offering the payment plan (see Heuristic #2). This heuristic will also save you enormous amounts of money over the course of your life by stopping you from buying things that, if you're honest with yourself, you can't actually afford.
Readers: What other frugality heuristics would you add?
READ NEXT: Good Games
Footnotes:
[1] Note that this goes double for investments, and triple!!!!11! for complex investments like variable annuities, universal life insurance policies, unit investment trusts, etc. Which gives us Investment Heuristic #2a: Do not invest in any investment that is sold to you.
[2] This includes those seemingly attractive 0% financing arrangements from car dealers that calculate your monthly payment by way of a complicated and opaque process. You think you're getting a great deal on a too-good-to-be-true interest rate, while they are likely arranging things such that you pay more than you think. Once again, see Heuristic #2 for the real reason these plans are offered to you in the first place.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Heuristics--rules of thumb--let you function on a strategy level rather than on a mere tactical level. A few well-thought-out heuristics can take the place of a million specific tips and tactics.
Look, we know retailers and consumer products companies become more and more sophisticated by the day in persuading us, manipulating us and extracting money from us. It is my hope that today's post will help you avoid most, if not all, of the traps and pitfalls awaiting us in the consumer marketplace.
Frugality Heuristic #1: Don't use money to solve problems.
This rule helps you consider alternatives to solving a given need without automatically defaulting to the marketplace to make a purchase. If it's an item you need: could you borrow it, freecycle it, or use something you already own? If it's a service, can you learn to do it yourself, or trade/barter for it? Better still, can you just "don't want!" it? And so on. Bonus: by using this heuristic over the long term, you'll build enormous adaptability, flexibility and resourcefulness.
Frugality Heuristic #2: If they're offering it to you, it's profitable for them--and unprofitable for you.
Notice that things are sold to you if and only if it's worth doing so. It must be meaningfully profitable to the entity doing the selling. Faithfully using this heuristic will protect you from products and services like extended warranties, upsells, excess insurance, most high-fee investment products[1], etc.
Frugality Heuristic #3: If it's advertised, you don't want it.
Remember: You the consumer pay for all advertising. Ad costs are always passed through to the end customer in the form of higher prices, yet despite this, the advertising-consumption model is perhaps one of the best systems ever devised for triggering desires and then separating us from our money. Do not play this game. At the very least, find an equivalent product that isn't advertised. A savvy and intelligent consumer thinks about the enormous cost of heavy advertising, knows that she ends up paying for it, and thus lets advertising become a stimulus not to buy.
Frugality Heuristic #4: Avoid all payment plans.
Payment plans obscure the true price you pay for something, and they almost always substantially increase your final cost[2] while substantially increasing profits to the company offering the payment plan (see Heuristic #2). This heuristic will also save you enormous amounts of money over the course of your life by stopping you from buying things that, if you're honest with yourself, you can't actually afford.
Readers: What other frugality heuristics would you add?
READ NEXT: Good Games
Footnotes:
[1] Note that this goes double for investments, and triple!!!!11! for complex investments like variable annuities, universal life insurance policies, unit investment trusts, etc. Which gives us Investment Heuristic #2a: Do not invest in any investment that is sold to you.
[2] This includes those seemingly attractive 0% financing arrangements from car dealers that calculate your monthly payment by way of a complicated and opaque process. You think you're getting a great deal on a too-good-to-be-true interest rate, while they are likely arranging things such that you pay more than you think. Once again, see Heuristic #2 for the real reason these plans are offered to you in the first place.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Where Brands (and Pseudo-knowledge) Go to Die
Readers, I wanted to share the following quote--although not for the reasons you might think:
"More students can identify Mr. Peanut and Joe Camel than can identify Abe Lincoln or Eleanor Roosevelt. They can identify twenty different kinds of cold cereal, but not the trees and birds in their neighborhood."
--Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other
This author's point (and on one level she's right) is that people know far more about brands and consumer products than they know about things that actually matter. Worse, we ingest this consumer product knowledge passively. It's deftly inserted into our minds by the media and advertising all around us.
On another level, however, this is one of those fist-shaking "kids these days" quotes every generation hears from its elders and betters. My generation heard this type of crap argument too: One of my favorite "kids these days" media narratives was those articles citing "studies" of how American kids of my generation were terrible in math (or science, or geography, or whatever) compared to Japanese kids. You can see how the media reflects our society's fears back at us: back in the 1970s and 1980s everybody was afraid the Japanese were going to kick our asses in everything and take over the world. Today, kids probably get to hear how academically pathetic they are compared to Indian kids, or Chinese kids. Probably both.
That's why reading quotes like these--reading them on a literal level, that is--often just makes you dumber. (Although note that meta-reading quotes like these may give you useful hints for which country's economy and stock market will collapse in the next decade.)
How long does psuedo-knowledge live?
But the real reason this quote grabbed me was in the way is shows, entirely unintentionally, how incredibly rapidly knowledge (really, pseudo-knowledge) about brands and consumer products becomes totally useless and obsolete.
Mary Pipher's book was first published in 1996, not that long ago. But already her brand references are unrecognizable to young people today. The first thought from someone under age twenty will likely be "What the heck is a Mr. Peanut?" [1] With Joe Camel, it's even worse: since cigarettes haven't been advertised in a generation, nobody young knows or even cares who Joe Camel is today.
And yet Joe Camel seemed like such a big deal in the 1980s and 1990s. Finger-wagging pundits back then were panic-stricken that millions of innocent children would fatally take up smoking because of this friendly cartoon mascot. [2]
There's one more irony, however, and it's the best of all. Today, Mary Pipher's quote is exactly wrong, and for reasons she'd never imagine. Far, far more kids today can identify Abe Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt than Mr. Peanut and Joe Camel, because nobody young has ever heard of Mr. Peanut or Joe Camel! So I guess that's pretty good.
With a few notable exceptions, the brands and mascots of prior generations have absolutely zero presence in the minds of the generations behind us. Upcoming generations have enough new pseudo-knowledge of their own: new brands, new products, new shows, media, and advertising mascots all deftly inserted into their brains. And in another few decades we'll collectively forget it all, all over again, and learn still more new crap. The pseudo-knowledge never ends, it just changes.
Thus there's a key difference between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge. One is stable, the other is in a constant state of change, always evolving. Trees, birds and major historical figures don't change; cereal brands and peanut mascots do. You'd think we'd find more value in learning the former versus the latter, but each generation, mine included, always seems to learn the pseudo-knowledge rather than the real thing.
READ NEXT: Is "Meet or Beat" Pricing Anti-Consumer?
AND: Rebellion Practice
Footnotes:
[1] And yet, weirdly, Wikipedia calls Mr. Peanut "one of the best known icons in advertising history." If anything, this just shows how quickly and fully each generation forgets the prior generation's pseudo-knowledge, while it labors to create (and waste time learning) its own.
[2] Totally unrelated sidenote: Many finger-waggers back then were also convinced, Freudian-like, that Joe Camel's face looked just like a penis. Sadly, once someone tells you this and you Google the image, you can never unsee it. Thanks, finger-waggers.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
"More students can identify Mr. Peanut and Joe Camel than can identify Abe Lincoln or Eleanor Roosevelt. They can identify twenty different kinds of cold cereal, but not the trees and birds in their neighborhood."
--Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other
This author's point (and on one level she's right) is that people know far more about brands and consumer products than they know about things that actually matter. Worse, we ingest this consumer product knowledge passively. It's deftly inserted into our minds by the media and advertising all around us.
On another level, however, this is one of those fist-shaking "kids these days" quotes every generation hears from its elders and betters. My generation heard this type of crap argument too: One of my favorite "kids these days" media narratives was those articles citing "studies" of how American kids of my generation were terrible in math (or science, or geography, or whatever) compared to Japanese kids. You can see how the media reflects our society's fears back at us: back in the 1970s and 1980s everybody was afraid the Japanese were going to kick our asses in everything and take over the world. Today, kids probably get to hear how academically pathetic they are compared to Indian kids, or Chinese kids. Probably both.
That's why reading quotes like these--reading them on a literal level, that is--often just makes you dumber. (Although note that meta-reading quotes like these may give you useful hints for which country's economy and stock market will collapse in the next decade.)
How long does psuedo-knowledge live?
But the real reason this quote grabbed me was in the way is shows, entirely unintentionally, how incredibly rapidly knowledge (really, pseudo-knowledge) about brands and consumer products becomes totally useless and obsolete.
Mary Pipher's book was first published in 1996, not that long ago. But already her brand references are unrecognizable to young people today. The first thought from someone under age twenty will likely be "What the heck is a Mr. Peanut?" [1] With Joe Camel, it's even worse: since cigarettes haven't been advertised in a generation, nobody young knows or even cares who Joe Camel is today.
And yet Joe Camel seemed like such a big deal in the 1980s and 1990s. Finger-wagging pundits back then were panic-stricken that millions of innocent children would fatally take up smoking because of this friendly cartoon mascot. [2]
There's one more irony, however, and it's the best of all. Today, Mary Pipher's quote is exactly wrong, and for reasons she'd never imagine. Far, far more kids today can identify Abe Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt than Mr. Peanut and Joe Camel, because nobody young has ever heard of Mr. Peanut or Joe Camel! So I guess that's pretty good.
With a few notable exceptions, the brands and mascots of prior generations have absolutely zero presence in the minds of the generations behind us. Upcoming generations have enough new pseudo-knowledge of their own: new brands, new products, new shows, media, and advertising mascots all deftly inserted into their brains. And in another few decades we'll collectively forget it all, all over again, and learn still more new crap. The pseudo-knowledge never ends, it just changes.
Thus there's a key difference between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge. One is stable, the other is in a constant state of change, always evolving. Trees, birds and major historical figures don't change; cereal brands and peanut mascots do. You'd think we'd find more value in learning the former versus the latter, but each generation, mine included, always seems to learn the pseudo-knowledge rather than the real thing.
READ NEXT: Is "Meet or Beat" Pricing Anti-Consumer?
AND: Rebellion Practice
Footnotes:
[1] And yet, weirdly, Wikipedia calls Mr. Peanut "one of the best known icons in advertising history." If anything, this just shows how quickly and fully each generation forgets the prior generation's pseudo-knowledge, while it labors to create (and waste time learning) its own.
[2] Totally unrelated sidenote: Many finger-waggers back then were also convinced, Freudian-like, that Joe Camel's face looked just like a penis. Sadly, once someone tells you this and you Google the image, you can never unsee it. Thanks, finger-waggers.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
We Know They Know! Six Things Consumers Can Do About Creepy Retailers Who Know Too Much
[Part 1 here]
Last week's article discussed some unsightly truths about modern retailing, and the TL;DR can be boiled down to three bullet points:
1) Retailers know a lot about us--much more than we think.
2) Consumers feel like they're being spied on when they discover this, and it makes us too creeped out to want to buy anything.
3) Retailers therefore camouflage their knowledge about us, to make it seem like they don't know as much as they know.
This is the unfortunate chess game being played around us, and today's post is my effort to come up with possible countermoves consumers can make in response to the retail industry's relentless desire to gather information about us. Below are six ideas, four of which will even save you money!
1) Avoid store loyalty cards.
Store loyalty cards are by far the most transparently obvious method stores use to gather information about our purchasing habits and patterns. Thus the most obvious place to start to make sure a given retailer knows as little as possible about you is to avoid store loyalty cards.
But. A smart retailer will make it really worthwhile for you to carry its loyalty card by offering exceptional deals and savings to "members." That's why this is the a rule I don't entirely follow: I'm willing to carry loyalty cards for a couple of grocery stores I frequent and one big liquor/beer/wine retailer in our town because each of these retailers from time to time offers profoundly attractive sale prices. But I draw the line at those few stores--I won't carry loyalty cards from any other retailer.
2) Use assumed names, plant false information.
Back in my college days, retailers and banks would set up booths in our dining halls to offer free gifts in return for a either completing a credit card application or a for obtaining a given retailer's store loyalty card. The trade was basically this: You take this free gift, they'll get information about you today--and, possibly, a they'll get a profitable customer relationship from you down the road.
I didn't have the high ethical standards back then that I have now, so one time while I was in college I filled out one of these applications using my roommate's name and information. The free gift was some really nice plastic Tupperware containers, and I still have some of these some 25 years later. I don't even feel bad about it.
Moving on to a less ethically dubious example: some retailers will ask you for your zip code at the point of purchase. Invariably I will either say, "I don't want to give that out" or I'll give a false zip code (usually 10101, which is midtown Manhattan). When asked on any information form for salary information or net worth information I'll usually put extremely low answers ($0 is my favorite choice if it's offered). I'm thinking one of two things: either no one will bother marketing to me, or I'll be sold things I'll never ever need, like payday loans. The central concept is this: whenever you're asked to supply personal information, do so with the intent to mislead gatherers of this information.
3) Avoid patterned buying--and fool retailers into sending you coupons.
The last time there was a 75% off sale on store-brand dried pasta at my grocery store, I bought twelve pounds. It was a rare, world-class deal--and six months later we're still not even halfway through it. So: imagine you're the grocery store tracking my specific buying patterns, What conclusions would you extract from some kook who buys 12lbs of pasta on one day, followed by a full year of no pasta purchases at all?
Maybe they'll think I'm pregnant.
Two quick things to note: a) unpatterned buying allows you to stock up massively whenever an extremely attractive sale comes up, thus saving you money, and b) a predictable response of a retailer to any extended period of not buying something (particularly if it's something you've bought regularly in the past) is to offer very attractive discount coupons for that product. They'll assume they've lost your business and they'll want to win it back! The consumer wins twice over.
4) Just. don't. buy.
The less consumer junk you buy the less valuable any information about you will be. I'd shudder to see a retailer like Target try to build predictive analytics on a customer like Jacob Lund Fisker (author of Early Retirement Extreme) for example. Another way to think about this is to use the Don't want it! heuristic, a concept we've addressed in our discussions of the synergies between the ideas of Marie Kondo and Jacob Lund Fisker.
Retailers want to gather information about consumerist customers--the people who automatically default to "buy something" as their solution to all problems, and thus run to the consumer marketplace to throw money at some product or service. Instead, protect your information and your wallet by being the type of person who would rather throw creativity at problems--solving them without autonomically spending money and making purchases.
5) Spread your buying around widely.
In my posts on how to beat inflation, we discussed the idea of making retailers compete, hard, for our spending. The ability to switch or substitute is a consumer's main weapon of empowerment, and it can be done at the product level (by showing brand disloyalty and switching brands) and at the store level (by shopping at a completely different retailer).
A frugal and informationally empowered consumer will spread her buying to where it's most efficient, while adding in occasional touches of randomness, like my example above of buying twelve pounds of pasta. This saves you money while wreaking havoc on retailers' efforts to gather information about you.
Finally:
6) Play along, sort of.
If readers have detected a somewhat conflicted tone in this post so far, it's because... I'm conflicted about this entire topic. As much as I hate the idea of retailers essentially spying on us and deducing patterns from our purchases, I think under certain limited circumstances it's okay if retailers gather some information about us, if it results in extremely attractive prices for products and services that you were going to buy anyway. This takes us back to the primary advantage of store loyalty cards to a savvy, price-aware consumer.
Remember, stores will predictably send really good coupons for items you normally buy if you "go too long" between purchases. That means an intelligent consumer can actually drive the delivery of useful coupons by making very large buys when sale prices are extremely attractive and then waiting to buy only when prices become extremely attractive again. In other words, it might very well be worthwhile to trade some information about your buying patterns with a limited number of retailers you frequently use--but only if you can take advantage too.
The bottom line, however, is this: retailers want to make it easy for us to spend money at their stores, and they'll use information about us to do so. It's up to us to not give in so easily! If we make it a just a little bit harder on them, we can get far better prices and far more value for the money we spend.
READ NEXT: Rousseau on Luxury: 10 Thoughts
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Last week's article discussed some unsightly truths about modern retailing, and the TL;DR can be boiled down to three bullet points:
1) Retailers know a lot about us--much more than we think.
2) Consumers feel like they're being spied on when they discover this, and it makes us too creeped out to want to buy anything.
3) Retailers therefore camouflage their knowledge about us, to make it seem like they don't know as much as they know.
This is the unfortunate chess game being played around us, and today's post is my effort to come up with possible countermoves consumers can make in response to the retail industry's relentless desire to gather information about us. Below are six ideas, four of which will even save you money!
1) Avoid store loyalty cards.
Store loyalty cards are by far the most transparently obvious method stores use to gather information about our purchasing habits and patterns. Thus the most obvious place to start to make sure a given retailer knows as little as possible about you is to avoid store loyalty cards.
But. A smart retailer will make it really worthwhile for you to carry its loyalty card by offering exceptional deals and savings to "members." That's why this is the a rule I don't entirely follow: I'm willing to carry loyalty cards for a couple of grocery stores I frequent and one big liquor/beer/wine retailer in our town because each of these retailers from time to time offers profoundly attractive sale prices. But I draw the line at those few stores--I won't carry loyalty cards from any other retailer.
2) Use assumed names, plant false information.
Back in my college days, retailers and banks would set up booths in our dining halls to offer free gifts in return for a either completing a credit card application or a for obtaining a given retailer's store loyalty card. The trade was basically this: You take this free gift, they'll get information about you today--and, possibly, a they'll get a profitable customer relationship from you down the road.
I didn't have the high ethical standards back then that I have now, so one time while I was in college I filled out one of these applications using my roommate's name and information. The free gift was some really nice plastic Tupperware containers, and I still have some of these some 25 years later. I don't even feel bad about it.
Moving on to a less ethically dubious example: some retailers will ask you for your zip code at the point of purchase. Invariably I will either say, "I don't want to give that out" or I'll give a false zip code (usually 10101, which is midtown Manhattan). When asked on any information form for salary information or net worth information I'll usually put extremely low answers ($0 is my favorite choice if it's offered). I'm thinking one of two things: either no one will bother marketing to me, or I'll be sold things I'll never ever need, like payday loans. The central concept is this: whenever you're asked to supply personal information, do so with the intent to mislead gatherers of this information.
3) Avoid patterned buying--and fool retailers into sending you coupons.
The last time there was a 75% off sale on store-brand dried pasta at my grocery store, I bought twelve pounds. It was a rare, world-class deal--and six months later we're still not even halfway through it. So: imagine you're the grocery store tracking my specific buying patterns, What conclusions would you extract from some kook who buys 12lbs of pasta on one day, followed by a full year of no pasta purchases at all?
Maybe they'll think I'm pregnant.
Two quick things to note: a) unpatterned buying allows you to stock up massively whenever an extremely attractive sale comes up, thus saving you money, and b) a predictable response of a retailer to any extended period of not buying something (particularly if it's something you've bought regularly in the past) is to offer very attractive discount coupons for that product. They'll assume they've lost your business and they'll want to win it back! The consumer wins twice over.
4) Just. don't. buy.
The less consumer junk you buy the less valuable any information about you will be. I'd shudder to see a retailer like Target try to build predictive analytics on a customer like Jacob Lund Fisker (author of Early Retirement Extreme) for example. Another way to think about this is to use the Don't want it! heuristic, a concept we've addressed in our discussions of the synergies between the ideas of Marie Kondo and Jacob Lund Fisker.
Retailers want to gather information about consumerist customers--the people who automatically default to "buy something" as their solution to all problems, and thus run to the consumer marketplace to throw money at some product or service. Instead, protect your information and your wallet by being the type of person who would rather throw creativity at problems--solving them without autonomically spending money and making purchases.
5) Spread your buying around widely.
In my posts on how to beat inflation, we discussed the idea of making retailers compete, hard, for our spending. The ability to switch or substitute is a consumer's main weapon of empowerment, and it can be done at the product level (by showing brand disloyalty and switching brands) and at the store level (by shopping at a completely different retailer).
A frugal and informationally empowered consumer will spread her buying to where it's most efficient, while adding in occasional touches of randomness, like my example above of buying twelve pounds of pasta. This saves you money while wreaking havoc on retailers' efforts to gather information about you.
Finally:
6) Play along, sort of.
If readers have detected a somewhat conflicted tone in this post so far, it's because... I'm conflicted about this entire topic. As much as I hate the idea of retailers essentially spying on us and deducing patterns from our purchases, I think under certain limited circumstances it's okay if retailers gather some information about us, if it results in extremely attractive prices for products and services that you were going to buy anyway. This takes us back to the primary advantage of store loyalty cards to a savvy, price-aware consumer.
Remember, stores will predictably send really good coupons for items you normally buy if you "go too long" between purchases. That means an intelligent consumer can actually drive the delivery of useful coupons by making very large buys when sale prices are extremely attractive and then waiting to buy only when prices become extremely attractive again. In other words, it might very well be worthwhile to trade some information about your buying patterns with a limited number of retailers you frequently use--but only if you can take advantage too.
The bottom line, however, is this: retailers want to make it easy for us to spend money at their stores, and they'll use information about us to do so. It's up to us to not give in so easily! If we make it a just a little bit harder on them, we can get far better prices and far more value for the money we spend.
READ NEXT: Rousseau on Luxury: 10 Thoughts
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
She Thinks She Hasn’t Been Spied On
If you've never heard the story about Target and the pregnant teenager, then you're dreadfully underarmed in the constantly escalating war between retailers and consumers.
As Charles Duhigg tells it in both The New York Times and in his insightful book The Power of Habit:
...a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation. "My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"
Turns out she already was pregnant, and Target--thanks to its sophisticated customer analytics--knew it long before her parents.
Now, obviously, Target wants to sell merchandise, it wants to gain market share, and it wants to understand your wants and needs so it can successfully sell more to you. The more a retailer knows about you and your life situation, the more effectively it can do this.
Unfortunately, many consumers mistakenly believe that a retailer's information about us comes from relatively limited range of sources--say, our purchasing activity at that retailer and our use of that specific retailer's loyalty cards.
Wrong! Retailers can (and do) buy information about you using all kinds of sources, most of which have nothing to do with what you buy in their stores. They can easily learn all kinds of things, like:
"...your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you've ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own."
Vulnerable to intervention
It gets worse. There are times when information about us is nearly priceless, times when consumers are, in the disconcerting phrasing of one academic, "vulnerable to intervention by marketers."
What exactly does this phrase mean, and why is it important? Duhigg explains it this way: "a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone's shopping patterns for years."
Retailers know that once a major life change happens to you--say you have a kid, buy your first house, or get divorced--you're going to start building an entirely new set of buying habits. And you'll likely be too busy (or too tired, or too passive) to price compare, and certainly you'll be too busy to go to multiple stores. If retailers can "intervene" at these times by offering you the specific products you want to buy at attractive prices, they can "help" you establish new buying habits. With them.
And so the soon-to-be-ex gets ads for cat food (or Russian brides), and the newly pregnant woman gets coupons for diapers and cribs.
If that isn't chilling enough, think about the online information gathering habits of companies like Faceborg, Amazon and Google, who have laughably easy access to our browsing habits. I experienced an all-too-typical example of this when browsing for K-Swiss tennis shoes recently on Amazon and then, creepily, saw ads for the exact same brand on Facebook, Yahoo Mail and other sites for days afterward. Classy.
Which takes us to a gigantic problem that retailers are only just beginning to grapple with: We know that they know. And it creeps us out.
A pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on
You have to get past the painfully offensive idea that a retailer can predict things like "you're pregnant" or "you're about to get divorced" to get to an even more offensive idea: that the very same retailer wants you to think they don't know about it.
One way they can do this is by offering carefully targeted ads to you, but camouflage them with other unrelated ads. This way you won't see the targeting. Thus they put ads for power tools and men's shirts next to the coupons for diapers and baby clothes. They mask their knowledge about us by simulating randomness. Target said it this way: "we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons."
My brain makes strange leaps sometimes, and weirdly enough, this reminds me of a story about British and American codebreakers during World War II. Once the Allied forces had broken the German codes, they knew astounding amounts of information about German troop movements, submarine movements, and so on. But if the Allies were too obvious about it and always seemed to know the locations of German subs or tank divisions, the Germans would quickly realize that their codes had been broken. They'd then do the absolute worst thing possible: change their code system, and the Allies would totally lose their informational advantage.
So the Allies made sure to "make mistakes" and do other things to camouflage their knowledge, to make it seem like they didn't know the codes! Unlike many modern retailers, they knew enough to consider the second order question: How do we make sure they don't know we know?
This is where we are right now with retailing. When we know they know, it ruins everything, and we're too angry and too creeped out to buy. So they have to do the same thing the Allies did: camouflage the fact that they know, so we don't think we've been spied on.
Readers, what do you think?
For further reading:
1) Charles Duhigg's original article in the New York Times, How Companies Learn Your Secrets.
2) Duhigg's exceptional book The Power of Habit. I recommend it to readers not only for context on retailing, but also for its insightful discussion on the psychology of habits, and how we can manage and control some (but unfortunately not all) of the aspects of our habit routines.
3) Also, have a look at Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, an excellent novel about World War II codebreakers that addresses the "meta" of how to keep them from knowing we know. A really entertaining read.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
As Charles Duhigg tells it in both The New York Times and in his insightful book The Power of Habit:
...a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation. "My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"
Turns out she already was pregnant, and Target--thanks to its sophisticated customer analytics--knew it long before her parents.
Now, obviously, Target wants to sell merchandise, it wants to gain market share, and it wants to understand your wants and needs so it can successfully sell more to you. The more a retailer knows about you and your life situation, the more effectively it can do this.
Unfortunately, many consumers mistakenly believe that a retailer's information about us comes from relatively limited range of sources--say, our purchasing activity at that retailer and our use of that specific retailer's loyalty cards.
Wrong! Retailers can (and do) buy information about you using all kinds of sources, most of which have nothing to do with what you buy in their stores. They can easily learn all kinds of things, like:
"...your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you've ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own."
Vulnerable to intervention
It gets worse. There are times when information about us is nearly priceless, times when consumers are, in the disconcerting phrasing of one academic, "vulnerable to intervention by marketers."
What exactly does this phrase mean, and why is it important? Duhigg explains it this way: "a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone's shopping patterns for years."
Retailers know that once a major life change happens to you--say you have a kid, buy your first house, or get divorced--you're going to start building an entirely new set of buying habits. And you'll likely be too busy (or too tired, or too passive) to price compare, and certainly you'll be too busy to go to multiple stores. If retailers can "intervene" at these times by offering you the specific products you want to buy at attractive prices, they can "help" you establish new buying habits. With them.
And so the soon-to-be-ex gets ads for cat food (or Russian brides), and the newly pregnant woman gets coupons for diapers and cribs.
If that isn't chilling enough, think about the online information gathering habits of companies like Faceborg, Amazon and Google, who have laughably easy access to our browsing habits. I experienced an all-too-typical example of this when browsing for K-Swiss tennis shoes recently on Amazon and then, creepily, saw ads for the exact same brand on Facebook, Yahoo Mail and other sites for days afterward. Classy.
Which takes us to a gigantic problem that retailers are only just beginning to grapple with: We know that they know. And it creeps us out.
A pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on
You have to get past the painfully offensive idea that a retailer can predict things like "you're pregnant" or "you're about to get divorced" to get to an even more offensive idea: that the very same retailer wants you to think they don't know about it.
One way they can do this is by offering carefully targeted ads to you, but camouflage them with other unrelated ads. This way you won't see the targeting. Thus they put ads for power tools and men's shirts next to the coupons for diapers and baby clothes. They mask their knowledge about us by simulating randomness. Target said it this way: "we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons."
My brain makes strange leaps sometimes, and weirdly enough, this reminds me of a story about British and American codebreakers during World War II. Once the Allied forces had broken the German codes, they knew astounding amounts of information about German troop movements, submarine movements, and so on. But if the Allies were too obvious about it and always seemed to know the locations of German subs or tank divisions, the Germans would quickly realize that their codes had been broken. They'd then do the absolute worst thing possible: change their code system, and the Allies would totally lose their informational advantage.
So the Allies made sure to "make mistakes" and do other things to camouflage their knowledge, to make it seem like they didn't know the codes! Unlike many modern retailers, they knew enough to consider the second order question: How do we make sure they don't know we know?
This is where we are right now with retailing. When we know they know, it ruins everything, and we're too angry and too creeped out to buy. So they have to do the same thing the Allies did: camouflage the fact that they know, so we don't think we've been spied on.
Readers, what do you think?
For further reading:
1) Charles Duhigg's original article in the New York Times, How Companies Learn Your Secrets.
2) Duhigg's exceptional book The Power of Habit. I recommend it to readers not only for context on retailing, but also for its insightful discussion on the psychology of habits, and how we can manage and control some (but unfortunately not all) of the aspects of our habit routines.
3) Also, have a look at Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, an excellent novel about World War II codebreakers that addresses the "meta" of how to keep them from knowing we know. A really entertaining read.
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Using the “Just Noticeable Difference” Against You
I wanted to share a quick idea with readers from a useful book: The Plateau Effect by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson. The idea is of the "just noticeable difference," and it shows up in intriguing ways in the consumer products world. Knowing about it--and how it can be used against us--adds yet another defensive tool to readers interested in consumer empowerment.
First, what is a just noticeable difference? Sullivan and Thompson write:
"Psychologists define it as the amount of change in something it would take for us to notice the change. The just-noticeable difference has its own law: It takes a specific percentage of change in the intensity of the stimulus for someone to notice, and that percentage is constant for a given stimulus. It's the word percentage that's important here. For example, if you stared at a pile of four rocks, walked away for a while, and then came back and saw that there were five rocks, you would likely notice the difference. That's a one-rock change, but it's a 25 percent increase in the number of rocks. Now let's do that mental exercise with a bigger pile. What if someone added a rock to a pile of a hundred rocks? You're unlikely to notice the difference as that's only a 1 percent increase--well below the just-noticeable difference."
Given this, let's explore one of the consumer products industry's sneakiest tricks: the stealth price hike. This is a when a company slightly reduces the size or weight of a product while maintaining the price. It's long been a staple technique of food and packaged goods companies--a technique that helps explains certain oddities in the grocery store: like why a 16 ounce can of beans is actually 14.5 ounces, and why cereal comes in weirdly light 11.8 ounce boxes and so on.
Okay: if you were a consumer products company, and you wanted to sneak a stealth price hike onto consumers, how would you do it? Here's how: You'd figure out what the Just Noticeable Difference was, and reduce the size just a little bit less than that.
And in order to be an alert and empowered consumer, someone who is mindful and aware of possible games being played around you, you will want your JND to be as small as possible, so you'll be attuned to stealthy pricing tactics like this. You'll be able to notice them and punish the company instantly by practicing brand disloyalty and switching to a competing product.
Here's another example: Imagine you are a consumer products company offering a "jumbo" size or "bonus" size product. You want to grab consumers' attention and make sure they perceive it to be a tangibly good deal. What would be the proper incremental size change? It would need to be slightly above the just noticeable difference. But not any more than that! Otherwise you'd be giving away incremental product at no incremental profit.
Give the frog a thermometer
It's bad enough that others use the JND concept against us, but it's far worse when we use it against ourselves. It's how we discover one day--to our horror--that we've somehow gained 20 pounds, or that we've gradually accumulated a big pile of consumer debt. These are the results of years of gradual, incremental activity, all of which happened below our just noticeable difference. To borrow the metaphor from Sullivan and Thompson: we had a 100 rock rockpile and we added a non-noticeable rock to it over and over again. We never really noticed, until "suddenly" the rockpile had a thousand rocks on it.
Which brings us to a useful tool we can use to protect ourselves from being fooled by JNDs: that tool is to establish clear, objective milestones and metrics.
Vegans and vegetarians please skip this paragraph: Everyone knows the story of the frog and a pot of boiling water: if you put a frog into a pot of already-boiling water, he'll jump right out. But if you put a frog into a pot of cool water and slowly, gradually, heat it up, he'll never notice. Those incremental changes are below his JND! He'll sit there and eventually boil to death.
So, give the frog a thermometer. Make it so you have a concrete and measurable way to catch these JNDs while they happen, and before they get out of control. A few examples:
* Periodically weigh yourself or track your BMI, and document any changes.
* Keep a training log where you measure yourself against basic fitness metrics.
* Maintain a price book for consumer products prices.
In terms of financial goals (saving for retirement, saving for a child's education, etc.), your "frog thermometer" would be to document specific, concrete financial milestones in advance (by year end 2018 I want to have $10,000 in my child's college fund, by year end 2019, $17,000, and so on), and then track your progress against these milestones. This approach can work for debt reduction and weight loss too.
Conclusion
The more meta you can be about JNDs, the better. Try to be mindful of where JNDs are likely to be used--and more importantly, be mindful of where they might be hiding, unperceived. Give yourself a frog thermometer and you won't be fooled again, by yourself or by others.
For Further Reading
The Plateau Effect by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
First, what is a just noticeable difference? Sullivan and Thompson write:
"Psychologists define it as the amount of change in something it would take for us to notice the change. The just-noticeable difference has its own law: It takes a specific percentage of change in the intensity of the stimulus for someone to notice, and that percentage is constant for a given stimulus. It's the word percentage that's important here. For example, if you stared at a pile of four rocks, walked away for a while, and then came back and saw that there were five rocks, you would likely notice the difference. That's a one-rock change, but it's a 25 percent increase in the number of rocks. Now let's do that mental exercise with a bigger pile. What if someone added a rock to a pile of a hundred rocks? You're unlikely to notice the difference as that's only a 1 percent increase--well below the just-noticeable difference."
Given this, let's explore one of the consumer products industry's sneakiest tricks: the stealth price hike. This is a when a company slightly reduces the size or weight of a product while maintaining the price. It's long been a staple technique of food and packaged goods companies--a technique that helps explains certain oddities in the grocery store: like why a 16 ounce can of beans is actually 14.5 ounces, and why cereal comes in weirdly light 11.8 ounce boxes and so on.
Okay: if you were a consumer products company, and you wanted to sneak a stealth price hike onto consumers, how would you do it? Here's how: You'd figure out what the Just Noticeable Difference was, and reduce the size just a little bit less than that.
And in order to be an alert and empowered consumer, someone who is mindful and aware of possible games being played around you, you will want your JND to be as small as possible, so you'll be attuned to stealthy pricing tactics like this. You'll be able to notice them and punish the company instantly by practicing brand disloyalty and switching to a competing product.
Here's another example: Imagine you are a consumer products company offering a "jumbo" size or "bonus" size product. You want to grab consumers' attention and make sure they perceive it to be a tangibly good deal. What would be the proper incremental size change? It would need to be slightly above the just noticeable difference. But not any more than that! Otherwise you'd be giving away incremental product at no incremental profit.
Give the frog a thermometer
It's bad enough that others use the JND concept against us, but it's far worse when we use it against ourselves. It's how we discover one day--to our horror--that we've somehow gained 20 pounds, or that we've gradually accumulated a big pile of consumer debt. These are the results of years of gradual, incremental activity, all of which happened below our just noticeable difference. To borrow the metaphor from Sullivan and Thompson: we had a 100 rock rockpile and we added a non-noticeable rock to it over and over again. We never really noticed, until "suddenly" the rockpile had a thousand rocks on it.
Which brings us to a useful tool we can use to protect ourselves from being fooled by JNDs: that tool is to establish clear, objective milestones and metrics.
Vegans and vegetarians please skip this paragraph: Everyone knows the story of the frog and a pot of boiling water: if you put a frog into a pot of already-boiling water, he'll jump right out. But if you put a frog into a pot of cool water and slowly, gradually, heat it up, he'll never notice. Those incremental changes are below his JND! He'll sit there and eventually boil to death.
So, give the frog a thermometer. Make it so you have a concrete and measurable way to catch these JNDs while they happen, and before they get out of control. A few examples:
* Periodically weigh yourself or track your BMI, and document any changes.
* Keep a training log where you measure yourself against basic fitness metrics.
* Maintain a price book for consumer products prices.
In terms of financial goals (saving for retirement, saving for a child's education, etc.), your "frog thermometer" would be to document specific, concrete financial milestones in advance (by year end 2018 I want to have $10,000 in my child's college fund, by year end 2019, $17,000, and so on), and then track your progress against these milestones. This approach can work for debt reduction and weight loss too.
Conclusion
The more meta you can be about JNDs, the better. Try to be mindful of where JNDs are likely to be used--and more importantly, be mindful of where they might be hiding, unperceived. Give yourself a frog thermometer and you won't be fooled again, by yourself or by others.
For Further Reading
The Plateau Effect by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
The All-Time Best Technique for Saving Money on Groceries
Want to make it easier to save money on food? This simple three-part shopping technique helps you save money at the grocery store every single time you go:
1) Have a flexible grocery list.
2) Have a collection of favorite recipes in your head (or on your smartphone).
3) Have a "treasure hunt" mindset for genuine screaming bargains.
Let's get into the details:
1) A flexible grocery list
If you bumble into a grocery store with a fixed, rigid grocery list, you're at the mercy of the prices the store offers you on that day. If you "need" ground beef, or butternut squash (or whatever), you're gonna end up paying whatever the store makes you pay. The worst and most costly form of this error is to "need" a totally out-of-season ingredient (e.g., fresh raspberries in the middle of winter), when the quality of the item is lowest and the price is highest.
In these situations you become a lowly price taker--you're stuck paying whatever price they ask, no matter how high. You might as well beg the store to separate you from your money.
Prices for any given product in your grocery store always fluctuate, and often fluctuate dramatically. If you stay flexible and ready to pounce on foods that are attractively priced--and only those foods--you'll be a price maker. In this case, you--not the store--decide the price you'll pay for something by not being rigid about when you buy it.
Next, we'll integrate Step #1 with our next step, Step #2:
2) A handy set of family-favorite recipes in your head (or smartphone)
When you see attractive sale prices on a given food item, the next step is to build recipes around that food. The easiest way to do this is to memorize your family's favorite heavy rotation recipes.
Of course, we live in the smartphone era nowadays, so readers can rely on their smartphones rather than literally carrying the recipes around in their brains. Either way, the goal is the same: structure what you eat that week around whatever foods are on sale.
Let's go over an example employing Steps #1 and #2 using my inside voice:
"Hmmmm... I see potatoes are on sale big time this week. Only $1.00 for a 5lb bag, and buy one get one free! Whoa. Okay what recipes can I build around that? Vegan Potato Peanut Curry? I already have tahini, peanut butter and garlic at home... let's see, spices too, I've got turmeric and cayenne already. I just need a 29-ounce can of diced tomatoes and I can make a huge double batch. It'll last all week!"
A sidenote to smartphone users: your memory isn't totally off the hook. As you can see, you'll also need to have some idea of what's sitting in your pantry back home that you might use to complete these recipes.
Here's the central principle: Build your meals based on what's on sale, rather than walking into the grocery store with a rigid list of ingredients for a rigid meal plan and paying whatever price they ask.
Another quick example, again using my inside voice:
"Stewed and canned tomatoes are 2/3 off this week, and I noticed a good sale on boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Hmmm, okay: I've already got unsweetened chocolate at home, and plenty of spices. This would be a good week to make some Chicken Mole, and it will feed us for a few days, easy!"
And so on. Once again, the idea is to combine your internalized knowledge of a set of basic (and ideally Laughably Cheap) family-favorite recipes, and match it with whatever happens to be on sale at the store. Result? A hilariously low grocery bill and plenty of healthy homemade food.
Now, let's move on to Step #3, which is essentially Steps #1 and #2 on steroids.
3) A "treasure hunt" mentality for genuine screaming bargains
Periodically a grocery store (or for that matter any retailer) will have a ridiculous sale on something. Perhaps it will be a buy one get two free (67% off) sale, or a manager's special on food that is about to pass its sell-by date.
About two months ago, I found a manager's special on Italian-style spicy sausage links, more than three pounds for the hilariously cheap price of $2.17. The meat was a day from its sell-by date, but so what? A sell-by date means nothing if you can freeze the item! I took it home, froze it, and we're still working our way through it, months--and many, many recipes--later.
Likewise, I wrote a post long ago about a pernil I prepared, featured in Daisy Martinez's wonderful cookbook Daisy Cooks. I was wandering through the meat section with my treasure hunt mindset on, and found a pork shoulder for the hilariously cheap price of 49c a pound. Which meant the 4.5lb pork shoulder I bought cost only $2.27.
These are minor and nearly silly examples, really, but they both illustrate the central principle: at some point over the course of a year, practically everything in a given grocery store will be offered at substantial markdowns. Make that the moment you buy.
One caveat: Keep in mind stores often use loss leader or doorbuster pricing in order to draw people into the store, with the condescending but unfortunately all too accurate presumption that once you're there, you'll spend money on other items too. The store therefore makes up its losses on the doorbuster item and then some. You, however, as a sophisticated consumer who knows to play chess, not checkers, with doorbuster pricing, will be way ahead of the game. You'll know to pick up the sale item and only that item, and then walk out, metaphorically (or literally?) rubbing your hands with glee for the legitimately great deal you just got.
Just like any other retailer, your grocery store is subject to various cycles and idiosyncrasies. Sometimes they misjudge demand. Sometimes they (or their suppliers) inadvertently ship excess inventory. Sometimes products simply need to be moved because the sell-by date approaches, and the store wants to make a little cash flow off of soon-to-be-worthless inventory.
A savvy consumer who remains alert to situations like these has a true treasure hunt mindset, and by combining the steps in this post, she can feed a family on a fraction of the cost of a typical, rigidly-structured grocery trip.
When shopping for groceries, knowing many recipes by heart allows one to tailor what's for dinner to whichever loss leaders are on sale, rather than venturing out with a shopping list and having to buy single missing ingredients.
--Early Retirement Extreme, by Jacob Lund Fisker
READ NEXT: Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers
AND: Should You Give Advice Encouraging Others Not to Spend?
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
1) Have a flexible grocery list.
2) Have a collection of favorite recipes in your head (or on your smartphone).
3) Have a "treasure hunt" mindset for genuine screaming bargains.
Let's get into the details:
1) A flexible grocery list
If you bumble into a grocery store with a fixed, rigid grocery list, you're at the mercy of the prices the store offers you on that day. If you "need" ground beef, or butternut squash (or whatever), you're gonna end up paying whatever the store makes you pay. The worst and most costly form of this error is to "need" a totally out-of-season ingredient (e.g., fresh raspberries in the middle of winter), when the quality of the item is lowest and the price is highest.
In these situations you become a lowly price taker--you're stuck paying whatever price they ask, no matter how high. You might as well beg the store to separate you from your money.
Prices for any given product in your grocery store always fluctuate, and often fluctuate dramatically. If you stay flexible and ready to pounce on foods that are attractively priced--and only those foods--you'll be a price maker. In this case, you--not the store--decide the price you'll pay for something by not being rigid about when you buy it.
Next, we'll integrate Step #1 with our next step, Step #2:
2) A handy set of family-favorite recipes in your head (or smartphone)
When you see attractive sale prices on a given food item, the next step is to build recipes around that food. The easiest way to do this is to memorize your family's favorite heavy rotation recipes.
Of course, we live in the smartphone era nowadays, so readers can rely on their smartphones rather than literally carrying the recipes around in their brains. Either way, the goal is the same: structure what you eat that week around whatever foods are on sale.
Let's go over an example employing Steps #1 and #2 using my inside voice:
"Hmmmm... I see potatoes are on sale big time this week. Only $1.00 for a 5lb bag, and buy one get one free! Whoa. Okay what recipes can I build around that? Vegan Potato Peanut Curry? I already have tahini, peanut butter and garlic at home... let's see, spices too, I've got turmeric and cayenne already. I just need a 29-ounce can of diced tomatoes and I can make a huge double batch. It'll last all week!"
A sidenote to smartphone users: your memory isn't totally off the hook. As you can see, you'll also need to have some idea of what's sitting in your pantry back home that you might use to complete these recipes.
Here's the central principle: Build your meals based on what's on sale, rather than walking into the grocery store with a rigid list of ingredients for a rigid meal plan and paying whatever price they ask.
Another quick example, again using my inside voice:
"Stewed and canned tomatoes are 2/3 off this week, and I noticed a good sale on boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Hmmm, okay: I've already got unsweetened chocolate at home, and plenty of spices. This would be a good week to make some Chicken Mole, and it will feed us for a few days, easy!"
And so on. Once again, the idea is to combine your internalized knowledge of a set of basic (and ideally Laughably Cheap) family-favorite recipes, and match it with whatever happens to be on sale at the store. Result? A hilariously low grocery bill and plenty of healthy homemade food.
Now, let's move on to Step #3, which is essentially Steps #1 and #2 on steroids.
3) A "treasure hunt" mentality for genuine screaming bargains
Periodically a grocery store (or for that matter any retailer) will have a ridiculous sale on something. Perhaps it will be a buy one get two free (67% off) sale, or a manager's special on food that is about to pass its sell-by date.
About two months ago, I found a manager's special on Italian-style spicy sausage links, more than three pounds for the hilariously cheap price of $2.17. The meat was a day from its sell-by date, but so what? A sell-by date means nothing if you can freeze the item! I took it home, froze it, and we're still working our way through it, months--and many, many recipes--later.
Likewise, I wrote a post long ago about a pernil I prepared, featured in Daisy Martinez's wonderful cookbook Daisy Cooks. I was wandering through the meat section with my treasure hunt mindset on, and found a pork shoulder for the hilariously cheap price of 49c a pound. Which meant the 4.5lb pork shoulder I bought cost only $2.27.
These are minor and nearly silly examples, really, but they both illustrate the central principle: at some point over the course of a year, practically everything in a given grocery store will be offered at substantial markdowns. Make that the moment you buy.
One caveat: Keep in mind stores often use loss leader or doorbuster pricing in order to draw people into the store, with the condescending but unfortunately all too accurate presumption that once you're there, you'll spend money on other items too. The store therefore makes up its losses on the doorbuster item and then some. You, however, as a sophisticated consumer who knows to play chess, not checkers, with doorbuster pricing, will be way ahead of the game. You'll know to pick up the sale item and only that item, and then walk out, metaphorically (or literally?) rubbing your hands with glee for the legitimately great deal you just got.
Just like any other retailer, your grocery store is subject to various cycles and idiosyncrasies. Sometimes they misjudge demand. Sometimes they (or their suppliers) inadvertently ship excess inventory. Sometimes products simply need to be moved because the sell-by date approaches, and the store wants to make a little cash flow off of soon-to-be-worthless inventory.
A savvy consumer who remains alert to situations like these has a true treasure hunt mindset, and by combining the steps in this post, she can feed a family on a fraction of the cost of a typical, rigidly-structured grocery trip.
When shopping for groceries, knowing many recipes by heart allows one to tailor what's for dinner to whichever loss leaders are on sale, rather than venturing out with a shopping list and having to buy single missing ingredients.
--Early Retirement Extreme, by Jacob Lund Fisker
READ NEXT: Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers
AND: Should You Give Advice Encouraging Others Not to Spend?
***********************
You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Four Reasons the Retail Apocalypse Hurts Frugal Consumers
In our last post we talked about how the decline of physical retailing is great for the environment. That was the good news.
But there's bad news too, unfortunately: The retail apocalypse is not great for consumers. Not at all.
And for frugal, bargain-hunting consumers, it's going to be really not great. As the retail environment evolves, we're going to get less and less value for the money we spend. Here's why:
1) Retail will become more oligopoly-like and less competitive. If you've read Casual Kitchen's recent posts on inflation and how to beat it, this will be obvious to you, but I'll say it anyway: as more and more physical retailers close down stores and exit the marketplace, the players that remain simply do not have to compete as hard to earn your purchasing dollars. This means higher prices, fewer alternatives, and less value for consumers.
2) Amazon is the mother of all "meet or beat" pricing players. As we know, meet or beat pricing results in higher prices for consumers, not lower prices. When a store claims it will beat any competitor's price, it just gives the other stores in a market an excuse to raise prices. Since consumers shopping in say, Best Buy, can quickly check their phones to compare prices, Amazon has zero incentive to cut prices--after all, they are the benchmark everyone will compare to. Worse, Best Buy has zero incentive to offer any price significantly lower than Amazon either! Neither retailer wants to start a race to the bottom that no one--except consumers--can win.
3) Fewer truly attractive sales. A less competitive retail environment will drive second-order effects: there will be far fewer retailers offering truly attractive sales and doorbuster-type opportunities. Doorbuster pricing and inventory liquidation sales can offer extraordinary value to disciplined and patient consumers--admittedly at the expense of a physical retailer that planned poorly for customer demand. In the increasingly virtual world of retailing, it's much easier to manage inventory, distribution is less complicated, and companies know a lot more about you and what you want (more on this in a moment). Truly glorious sales--the kind that result when a retailer badly misjudges demand and later needs to liquidate unwanted inventory--will be far less common in the new retailing environment.
4) Worse informational asymmetry. Amazon and all the various online information gatherers know a lot more about us than we know about them. As their share of retailing grows, the informational advantage they have over us grows too. We will know less and less about what happens behind the scenes. Worse, we can't see--and most of us are hardly even aware of--all the informational trails we leave online. Online retailers gather this information relentlessly, and use it to their advantage.
Final thoughts
There will be other pros and cons to the new retail beyond the negative impact on consumers. For one thing, there will be lots and lots of job losses. But don't forget: at one time the USA's labor force was 95+% agricultural (it's less than 1% now), and buggy whip manufacturing, whale oil refining and 35mm photography all used to be gigantic industries. Our economy has handled bigger and far more wracking transformations--we'll muddle through this one as well.
It's probably too early to really forecast the cultural impact here, although I can speculate that the Amazoning of retail will further worsen the atomization of our society. I'm sure there will be other cultural impacts that we haven't even thought about.
Finally, remember that one of my central goals here at Casual Kitchen is to help consumers become better informed and more empowered. And there's a laughably easy solution for the coming consumer-unfriendly retail environment--and it's a solution anyone can adopt: just buy less freaking stuff. We have an absurdly consumerist culture here in the USA. Would it be so bad to tone it down a little? No matter how much market share or informational advantages online retail might have, they cannot take away our power and our psychological agency. We are the ones who willingly fish our credit cards out of our pockets and click "buy"--and therefore we consumers are the ones with ultimate power here.
What do you think?
***********************
Readers! Despite these secular trends (!), you can still help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
But there's bad news too, unfortunately: The retail apocalypse is not great for consumers. Not at all.
And for frugal, bargain-hunting consumers, it's going to be really not great. As the retail environment evolves, we're going to get less and less value for the money we spend. Here's why:
1) Retail will become more oligopoly-like and less competitive. If you've read Casual Kitchen's recent posts on inflation and how to beat it, this will be obvious to you, but I'll say it anyway: as more and more physical retailers close down stores and exit the marketplace, the players that remain simply do not have to compete as hard to earn your purchasing dollars. This means higher prices, fewer alternatives, and less value for consumers.
2) Amazon is the mother of all "meet or beat" pricing players. As we know, meet or beat pricing results in higher prices for consumers, not lower prices. When a store claims it will beat any competitor's price, it just gives the other stores in a market an excuse to raise prices. Since consumers shopping in say, Best Buy, can quickly check their phones to compare prices, Amazon has zero incentive to cut prices--after all, they are the benchmark everyone will compare to. Worse, Best Buy has zero incentive to offer any price significantly lower than Amazon either! Neither retailer wants to start a race to the bottom that no one--except consumers--can win.
3) Fewer truly attractive sales. A less competitive retail environment will drive second-order effects: there will be far fewer retailers offering truly attractive sales and doorbuster-type opportunities. Doorbuster pricing and inventory liquidation sales can offer extraordinary value to disciplined and patient consumers--admittedly at the expense of a physical retailer that planned poorly for customer demand. In the increasingly virtual world of retailing, it's much easier to manage inventory, distribution is less complicated, and companies know a lot more about you and what you want (more on this in a moment). Truly glorious sales--the kind that result when a retailer badly misjudges demand and later needs to liquidate unwanted inventory--will be far less common in the new retailing environment.
4) Worse informational asymmetry. Amazon and all the various online information gatherers know a lot more about us than we know about them. As their share of retailing grows, the informational advantage they have over us grows too. We will know less and less about what happens behind the scenes. Worse, we can't see--and most of us are hardly even aware of--all the informational trails we leave online. Online retailers gather this information relentlessly, and use it to their advantage.
Final thoughts
There will be other pros and cons to the new retail beyond the negative impact on consumers. For one thing, there will be lots and lots of job losses. But don't forget: at one time the USA's labor force was 95+% agricultural (it's less than 1% now), and buggy whip manufacturing, whale oil refining and 35mm photography all used to be gigantic industries. Our economy has handled bigger and far more wracking transformations--we'll muddle through this one as well.
It's probably too early to really forecast the cultural impact here, although I can speculate that the Amazoning of retail will further worsen the atomization of our society. I'm sure there will be other cultural impacts that we haven't even thought about.
Finally, remember that one of my central goals here at Casual Kitchen is to help consumers become better informed and more empowered. And there's a laughably easy solution for the coming consumer-unfriendly retail environment--and it's a solution anyone can adopt: just buy less freaking stuff. We have an absurdly consumerist culture here in the USA. Would it be so bad to tone it down a little? No matter how much market share or informational advantages online retail might have, they cannot take away our power and our psychological agency. We are the ones who willingly fish our credit cards out of our pockets and click "buy"--and therefore we consumers are the ones with ultimate power here.
What do you think?
***********************
Readers! Despite these secular trends (!), you can still help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
What Could POSSIBLY Be Good About the Retail Apocalypse? Just This One Thing...
By now the phrase "retail apocalypse" has entered everyday parlance and everyone knows what it means: Amazon will destroy everything, leaving smoking holes wherever there used to be perfectly nice and harmless retailers.
It'll be just like what Walmart did twenty years ago, except Amazon will do it faster, meaner, and with more clinical detachment.
And when it's all said and done, there'll be a few Chipotles and mani-pedi shops left over--you know: service businesses Amazon hasn't yet learned how to replicate. There will be no other retail survivors.
This unmitigated disaster is the consensus scenario on what Amazon is about to do to the retailing industry. Cheery, huh?
Then again, to borrow a phrase from my old investing career: the consensus is often wrong but never in doubt. And it's generally a terrible idea to allow consensus thinkers to do all our thinking for us. So, could there be another, non-consensus perspective on the secular growth of Amazon and online retailing?
Here's one: it's an unmitigated blessing for the environment. The six bullet points below explain.
1) Stores can revert back to green space and habitat. Most stores simply don't have to be there anymore. Retail space could return to open space, and all those hideous-looking big-box stores, shopping malls and strip malls could go back to being trees, grass and the natural habitat they used to be. Or, perhaps even better, these built-over spaces could be reused for low-cost housing, public parks and playgrounds. Any of these uses would be far more societally beneficial than feeding consumerism.
2) Think about all the pavement. For every 1,000 square feet of retail space, there's another 1,200 additional square feet of paved-over parking space. This is pavement sufficient to park 3-4 cars, roughly. [1] This doesn't even count additional paved-over ground for road access, for truck loading/unloading, for firelane space, for space between parking lanes, etc. Every square foot of decommissioned retail space counts well more than double--possibly more than triple--once you consider accompanying paved areas.
3) Pavement and parking lots are disastrous for the environment. Pavement disrupts the soil's natural role in cleansing, draining and filtering our water. Parking lots and road surfaces also generate pollutant-heavy storm sewer runoff that typically goes directly into local rivers and lakes. Remember decades ago when we used to pollute our environment with industrial waste? Now we do it with pavement runoff. [2]
4) Redundant warehousing and distribution infrastructure eliminated. For every retail store you see, there's a largely invisible network of warehousing and distribution supporting it behind the scenes. This represents still more environmentally disruptive buildings, infrastructure and pavement, most of which are unnecessary. As a recent example of what I mean, consider the failed and now-liquidated retailer Sports Authority. It competed with Dick's Sporting Goods, often placing its stores in the very same malls and neighborhoods. Sports Authority had its own warehouses, storage, distribution hubs, trucks, inventory and systems--an unprofitable, unnecessary and entirely redundant national retailing infrastructure exactly copied by a nearly identical retailer. All totally unnecessary. Imagine all the other carbon-copy retailers in the innumerable subsectors of retail, and then imagine all the additional infrastructure behind the scenes that simply doesn't need to be there.
5) Redundant shipping/trucking/fossil fuel use eliminated. Merchandise doesn't magically travel to store shelves and display cases by itself. It needs to be trucked there. Worse, physical retailers also have to guess what you're going to buy, and in what unit volumes, and then ship it from the docks to warehouses and distribution nodes, and then to the stores themselves. All this inventory (assuming it isn't stolen, broken or damaged en route) is unloaded and set on display in brightly-lit, well-heated and completely wasteful indoor environments designed specifically to tempt you to buy. If the retailer is wrong about what the customers want (they often are), they pack it back up and then ship it all the way back to be dealt with yet again. This is an entire layer of shipping, distribution and display now made largely unnecessary by online/virtual storefronts.
6) Wasteful last mile customer driving reduced significantly. One of the largest single drivers (pun intended) of excess carbon footprint and energy waste occurs when customers drive to and from stores. [3] Most of this last-mile customer driving could and probably should be replaced by UPS, FedEx and the postal system, all of which already have well-scaled distribution systems in place which are far less wasteful and far more efficient than individual cars on individual shopping trips.
Concluding thoughts
Retail is entering a period of much-needed and long-overdue rationalization as we replace an old, outmoded way of selling things with a more efficient and less environmentally harmful way. We are vastly overstored in the USA, and for every unnecessary store, there's still more pavement, warehousing, distribution, trucking and redundant infrastructure behind it all.
Maybe the retail apocalypse isn't so bad after all.
Resources/for further reading:
[1] See this intriguing 1950's era parking/planning report giving standard assumptions for parking space/retail space ratios. Today, ratios probably run meaningfully higher still. Also note this gem of a quote: "We know of no existing [shopping] center that has too much parking."
[2] Scientific American on stormwater pavement runoff and its environmental impact.
[3] Intriguingly, the extraordinary wastefulness of last-mile driving is also one of the most compelling arguments against the local food movement. For more on this, see the readable and counterintuitive book The Locavore's Dilemma by Hiroko Shimizu and Pierre Desrochers.
***********************
Readers! You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
It'll be just like what Walmart did twenty years ago, except Amazon will do it faster, meaner, and with more clinical detachment.
And when it's all said and done, there'll be a few Chipotles and mani-pedi shops left over--you know: service businesses Amazon hasn't yet learned how to replicate. There will be no other retail survivors.
This unmitigated disaster is the consensus scenario on what Amazon is about to do to the retailing industry. Cheery, huh?
Then again, to borrow a phrase from my old investing career: the consensus is often wrong but never in doubt. And it's generally a terrible idea to allow consensus thinkers to do all our thinking for us. So, could there be another, non-consensus perspective on the secular growth of Amazon and online retailing?
Here's one: it's an unmitigated blessing for the environment. The six bullet points below explain.
1) Stores can revert back to green space and habitat. Most stores simply don't have to be there anymore. Retail space could return to open space, and all those hideous-looking big-box stores, shopping malls and strip malls could go back to being trees, grass and the natural habitat they used to be. Or, perhaps even better, these built-over spaces could be reused for low-cost housing, public parks and playgrounds. Any of these uses would be far more societally beneficial than feeding consumerism.
2) Think about all the pavement. For every 1,000 square feet of retail space, there's another 1,200 additional square feet of paved-over parking space. This is pavement sufficient to park 3-4 cars, roughly. [1] This doesn't even count additional paved-over ground for road access, for truck loading/unloading, for firelane space, for space between parking lanes, etc. Every square foot of decommissioned retail space counts well more than double--possibly more than triple--once you consider accompanying paved areas.
3) Pavement and parking lots are disastrous for the environment. Pavement disrupts the soil's natural role in cleansing, draining and filtering our water. Parking lots and road surfaces also generate pollutant-heavy storm sewer runoff that typically goes directly into local rivers and lakes. Remember decades ago when we used to pollute our environment with industrial waste? Now we do it with pavement runoff. [2]
4) Redundant warehousing and distribution infrastructure eliminated. For every retail store you see, there's a largely invisible network of warehousing and distribution supporting it behind the scenes. This represents still more environmentally disruptive buildings, infrastructure and pavement, most of which are unnecessary. As a recent example of what I mean, consider the failed and now-liquidated retailer Sports Authority. It competed with Dick's Sporting Goods, often placing its stores in the very same malls and neighborhoods. Sports Authority had its own warehouses, storage, distribution hubs, trucks, inventory and systems--an unprofitable, unnecessary and entirely redundant national retailing infrastructure exactly copied by a nearly identical retailer. All totally unnecessary. Imagine all the other carbon-copy retailers in the innumerable subsectors of retail, and then imagine all the additional infrastructure behind the scenes that simply doesn't need to be there.
5) Redundant shipping/trucking/fossil fuel use eliminated. Merchandise doesn't magically travel to store shelves and display cases by itself. It needs to be trucked there. Worse, physical retailers also have to guess what you're going to buy, and in what unit volumes, and then ship it from the docks to warehouses and distribution nodes, and then to the stores themselves. All this inventory (assuming it isn't stolen, broken or damaged en route) is unloaded and set on display in brightly-lit, well-heated and completely wasteful indoor environments designed specifically to tempt you to buy. If the retailer is wrong about what the customers want (they often are), they pack it back up and then ship it all the way back to be dealt with yet again. This is an entire layer of shipping, distribution and display now made largely unnecessary by online/virtual storefronts.
6) Wasteful last mile customer driving reduced significantly. One of the largest single drivers (pun intended) of excess carbon footprint and energy waste occurs when customers drive to and from stores. [3] Most of this last-mile customer driving could and probably should be replaced by UPS, FedEx and the postal system, all of which already have well-scaled distribution systems in place which are far less wasteful and far more efficient than individual cars on individual shopping trips.
Concluding thoughts
Retail is entering a period of much-needed and long-overdue rationalization as we replace an old, outmoded way of selling things with a more efficient and less environmentally harmful way. We are vastly overstored in the USA, and for every unnecessary store, there's still more pavement, warehousing, distribution, trucking and redundant infrastructure behind it all.
Maybe the retail apocalypse isn't so bad after all.
Resources/for further reading:
[1] See this intriguing 1950's era parking/planning report giving standard assumptions for parking space/retail space ratios. Today, ratios probably run meaningfully higher still. Also note this gem of a quote: "We know of no existing [shopping] center that has too much parking."
[2] Scientific American on stormwater pavement runoff and its environmental impact.
[3] Intriguingly, the extraordinary wastefulness of last-mile driving is also one of the most compelling arguments against the local food movement. For more on this, see the readable and counterintuitive book The Locavore's Dilemma by Hiroko Shimizu and Pierre Desrochers.
***********************
Readers! You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
Is “Meet Or Beat” Pricing Anti-Consumer?
The four biggest British supermarket chains all offer some form of price-match guarantee, promising that their customers could not save any money by shopping elsewhere.
--from The Economist
Any savvy, empowered consumer will have a predictable response to claims like "You won't save money by shopping elsewhere." We laugh inwardly and disbelieve. Claims like this work out great for the claimer only if no one actually tests it.
So when a claim like this is made by four separate grocery store chains in the same region at the same time, it's a "what you talkin' bout Willis" moment. [1] A real credulity-stretcher.
Obviously, and by definition, not every store can be the cheapest. But every store benefits by fooling their customers into not checking!
Which takes us to the counterintuitive economics of "meet or beat" pricing.
When a store in your community adopts meet or beat pricing, it sounds at first like a great idea. Theoretically, you always know that you'll get the best price by going there. So, you can just go there.
Wrong! What real-world examples teach us is that meet or beat pricing is inflationary--it actually makes prices go up. In order to see why, though, you have to ask the second order question: And then what?
This is exactly what all the other competing stores in town are asking themselves: How can I compete when I know this meet or beat store will always match or beat my price?
It then becomes game theory situation. The other stores can try and cut prices, but they'll only hurt themselves. Worse, typically, the store adopting meet or beat pricing is usually that market's low-cost provider anyway.
You don't compete on price unless you can compete on price. So, the other stores must compete some other way. Thus the correct game theory response--if you're not the store with the lowest cost structure--is to raise prices. It sounds counterintuitive, but this is actually what happens in any market where one player embraces a meet or beat strategy.
In this case, the market creates its own pricing umbrella, and all the retailers win. At your expense. Your prices go up, even as you think you're getting the best deal in town.
[1] https://youtu.be/Le6qeMe7-vM
--from The Economist
Any savvy, empowered consumer will have a predictable response to claims like "You won't save money by shopping elsewhere." We laugh inwardly and disbelieve. Claims like this work out great for the claimer only if no one actually tests it.
So when a claim like this is made by four separate grocery store chains in the same region at the same time, it's a "what you talkin' bout Willis" moment. [1] A real credulity-stretcher.
Obviously, and by definition, not every store can be the cheapest. But every store benefits by fooling their customers into not checking!
Which takes us to the counterintuitive economics of "meet or beat" pricing.
When a store in your community adopts meet or beat pricing, it sounds at first like a great idea. Theoretically, you always know that you'll get the best price by going there. So, you can just go there.
Wrong! What real-world examples teach us is that meet or beat pricing is inflationary--it actually makes prices go up. In order to see why, though, you have to ask the second order question: And then what?
This is exactly what all the other competing stores in town are asking themselves: How can I compete when I know this meet or beat store will always match or beat my price?
It then becomes game theory situation. The other stores can try and cut prices, but they'll only hurt themselves. Worse, typically, the store adopting meet or beat pricing is usually that market's low-cost provider anyway.
You don't compete on price unless you can compete on price. So, the other stores must compete some other way. Thus the correct game theory response--if you're not the store with the lowest cost structure--is to raise prices. It sounds counterintuitive, but this is actually what happens in any market where one player embraces a meet or beat strategy.
In this case, the market creates its own pricing umbrella, and all the retailers win. At your expense. Your prices go up, even as you think you're getting the best deal in town.
[1] https://youtu.be/Le6qeMe7-vM
What Barefoot Running Taught Us About Expensive Sneakers (And What Nike and Others Really Don’t Want You To Know)
"You're definitely gonna want to pay a lot of money for good quality sneakers. I mean, seriously, if you go running in those $29.99 loser no-name running shoes, you'll hurt your knees! Or your iliotibial band. Or something. You'll definitely hurt something.
Forget those cheap shoes. These $175 running shoes are far better. Mass produced, yet designed to fit your feet. And they're built for comfort, with extra padding to absorb all those shocks to your body."
Readers, this is the basic marketing message behind high-end sneaker brands. For many, it's highly persuasive. After all, how dumb would it be to take a chance on some no-name pair of sneakers... and maybe hurt yourself. Right?
But then, something odd happened.
Some ten or so years ago, "barefoot running" became all the rage. And it raised questions the sneaker industry didn't want you asking. For example, a thoughtful if sarcastic sneaker buyer might ask, "Now hold on a minute: First I had to buy overpriced cushiony sneakers to protect myself from injury. And now you're telling me I don't even need shoes?"
But it gets worse: it turns out that many if not most running injuries result from protecting ourselves too much. All that padding in all those ultra-expensive shoes actually prevents our body from feeling, sensing and properly responding to the various healthy stresses of running. Or, as researchers at the University of Oregon found, "the greater the cushioning in the shoe, the greater the impact shock on the leg."
Ironically, this highly counterintuitive discovery was made in Eugene, Oregon--barely a hundred or so miles from Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton. Huh.
Somehow, our consumer civilization transformed running--a quintessentially basic human act--into an expensive pastime, with luxury-branded shoes, unpronounceable injuries... and $300+ marathon entry fees.
It's also instructive to observe the shoe industry's response. After all, no one makes money not selling shoes, so Nike and other high end sneaker brands had to at least try to figure out a way to "brand" the barefoot running experience too.
And so, for only about a hundred bucks or so, we can buy a pair of Nike "Barefoot-Like" sneakers. They're for sale on Nike's website, right next to all those expensive heavily-padded shoes we were supposed to buy before.
Readers, tell me, how are expensive branded sneakers any different from any other zombie-based advertising/consumption cycle? And if it bugs you to pay 30% more for, say, a name-brand can of tuna when it furtively emerges out of the same third-party factory as lower-priced unbranded tuna, shouldn't it bug you enormously to pay 700% more for sneakers? Especially when all those sneaker features they use to justify their high price at best make no difference, and at worst might actually hurt us?
A final note: Speaking as a three-time marathoner and multi-time half-marathoner who's logged thousand and thousands of running miles, most running injuries are form- or technique-based. This goes double for casual runners. In other words, fix your running form, improve your technique, and you'll run injury-free in whatever pair of reasonably priced sneakers you're happy with. For readers interested in an excellent resource on how to improve running technique, I strongly recommend Danny Dreyer's book Chi Running.
Resources:
1) A short video of a fateful day when the NY Times did a piece on barefoot running. Hipsters raged, then bravely began the search for the next new thing. Note also the mention of the University of Oregon's biomechanical research study at 2:21 in the video.
2) More on how to run barefoot.
3) Why is too much protection a bad thing? For more on this topic, see Nicholas Taleb's discussion of the concepts of hormesis and mithridization in his book Antifragile.
READ NEXT: The Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
AND: When U Know The Cost, U Know the Margins
Forget those cheap shoes. These $175 running shoes are far better. Mass produced, yet designed to fit your feet. And they're built for comfort, with extra padding to absorb all those shocks to your body."
Readers, this is the basic marketing message behind high-end sneaker brands. For many, it's highly persuasive. After all, how dumb would it be to take a chance on some no-name pair of sneakers... and maybe hurt yourself. Right?
But then, something odd happened.
Some ten or so years ago, "barefoot running" became all the rage. And it raised questions the sneaker industry didn't want you asking. For example, a thoughtful if sarcastic sneaker buyer might ask, "Now hold on a minute: First I had to buy overpriced cushiony sneakers to protect myself from injury. And now you're telling me I don't even need shoes?"
But it gets worse: it turns out that many if not most running injuries result from protecting ourselves too much. All that padding in all those ultra-expensive shoes actually prevents our body from feeling, sensing and properly responding to the various healthy stresses of running. Or, as researchers at the University of Oregon found, "the greater the cushioning in the shoe, the greater the impact shock on the leg."
Ironically, this highly counterintuitive discovery was made in Eugene, Oregon--barely a hundred or so miles from Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton. Huh.
Somehow, our consumer civilization transformed running--a quintessentially basic human act--into an expensive pastime, with luxury-branded shoes, unpronounceable injuries... and $300+ marathon entry fees.
It's also instructive to observe the shoe industry's response. After all, no one makes money not selling shoes, so Nike and other high end sneaker brands had to at least try to figure out a way to "brand" the barefoot running experience too.
And so, for only about a hundred bucks or so, we can buy a pair of Nike "Barefoot-Like" sneakers. They're for sale on Nike's website, right next to all those expensive heavily-padded shoes we were supposed to buy before.
Readers, tell me, how are expensive branded sneakers any different from any other zombie-based advertising/consumption cycle? And if it bugs you to pay 30% more for, say, a name-brand can of tuna when it furtively emerges out of the same third-party factory as lower-priced unbranded tuna, shouldn't it bug you enormously to pay 700% more for sneakers? Especially when all those sneaker features they use to justify their high price at best make no difference, and at worst might actually hurt us?
A final note: Speaking as a three-time marathoner and multi-time half-marathoner who's logged thousand and thousands of running miles, most running injuries are form- or technique-based. This goes double for casual runners. In other words, fix your running form, improve your technique, and you'll run injury-free in whatever pair of reasonably priced sneakers you're happy with. For readers interested in an excellent resource on how to improve running technique, I strongly recommend Danny Dreyer's book Chi Running.
Resources:
1) A short video of a fateful day when the NY Times did a piece on barefoot running. Hipsters raged, then bravely began the search for the next new thing. Note also the mention of the University of Oregon's biomechanical research study at 2:21 in the video.
2) More on how to run barefoot.
3) Why is too much protection a bad thing? For more on this topic, see Nicholas Taleb's discussion of the concepts of hormesis and mithridization in his book Antifragile.
READ NEXT: The Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
AND: When U Know The Cost, U Know the Margins
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
