Since we only have a few more shopping days until Christmas….

…I thought it’d be appropriate to re-post this. 

Everyone keeps saying that we buy more and more online, and that the bricks-and-mortar stores are suffering. Well, someone neglected to tell that to the people in my city. I live near a large shopping district and a mall, and the only way to get more folks in here on the weekends is if we airdropped them in like relief packages. 

So, whether you’re venturing out to just purchase one present or all of them, you should probably read this first. It’s some good information to have freshly tucked away, before you and your MasterCard leave the house. The merchants have been waiting all year to see you, …and they’re intent on having you spend some cash during your stay. 

Here’s hoping you enjoy the ‘hustle-and-bustle’ of the stores (that sounds more festive than ‘crazed mobs‘, don’t you think?), and be sure to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

–JTR

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BEFORE YOU GO SHOPPING TODAY….

(***Originally posted 6/23/2012)

….you may wish to check out Kathryn Blaze Carlson’s excellent article in the National Post from earlier this month. It touches on something that we all know in our hearts, but we usually feel we’re smart enough to avoid: Marketing.

The marketers are everywhere: Google, the supermarket, where we buy gas…….we can’t escape ’em. To deal with being constantly saturated by marketing, we simply believe we’re so savvy that we can see through all of the marketer’s ploys.

Yeah, right. Guess again.

From Canada’s National Post:

Before you go shopping today…

….you may wish to check out Kathryn Blaze Carlson’s excellent article in the National Post from earlier this month. It touches on something that we all know in our hearts, but we usually feel we’re smart enough to avoid: Marketing.

The marketers are everywhere: Google, the supermarket, where we buy gas…….we can’t escape ’em. To deal with being constantly saturated by marketing, we simply believe we’re so savvy that we can see through all of the marketer’s ploys.

Yeah, right. Guess again.

From Canada’s National Post:

Robb Engen weaves back and forth through the maze, following his wife in what he calls “zombie mode.” He submits to her and the labyrinthine Calgary retail outlet, wandering along as she adds this and that to their shopping cart. By the time they finally reach the exit, the Alberta couple has almost always bought more than they had planned.

“We go there with a list and with the intention to leave with what we planned on buying, but something about that store makes it so you can’t help but leave with a few extra things,” Mr. Engen said.

The 32-year-old father and personal finance blogger is, of course, describing a typical visit to IKEA, the iconic Swedish retailer that attracts 734 million shoppers annually and which has just announced plans for its largest North American store in Montreal. At 464,694 square feet, the store will knock the Berlin IKEA from its ranking as the fifth-largest in the world.

By the time customers wind through 54 “inspirational room settings,” three full home settings, the so-called market hall, and a restaurant that seats 600, they will have shopped for 1.5 kilometres. Most will have spent an entire Saturday afternoon zig-zagging back and forth and up and down, all for the privilege of passing a gazillion items they had no intention of buying but suddenly realize they must have.

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So shoppers might think they buy a particular item because they decided on their own that they want it, but they also buy because stores use tactics that make it almost impossible for them not to: From the oversized shopping carts proven to make us spend more, to the escalators that take us deeper into a store only to force us across the entire retail floor to go back up or down, to the pie crusts in the grocery store fruit section that inspire us to bake on a whim, to the placement of staple foods toward the back of a supermarket so we have to pass everything else on the way.

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But IKEA, with its maze that winds shoppers first through a series of inspirational room settings and then through the market hall, is the retailer that stands out in its almost backward and yet highly successful approach. When Mr. Engen said there is “something about that store,” he was right.

(**Click the map below to ENLARGE**)

According to one expert, the flow of the store disorients customers, it coaxes them past every household item imaginable [unless they access the shortcuts], it tempts them to put items in their cart “just in case I want it” for fear of having to try to find it again later, and it gives them license to impulse-buy.

“By the time you get [to the market hall] you’ve already gone backwards and forwards on yourself through the showrooms, past every [inspirational] setting, and you’ve probably spent half-an-hour,” said Alan Penn, a University College London professor who, together with a former graduate student, used the school’s virtual reality centre to study how shoppers navigate and buy at IKEA. “Only then are you allowed to start buying, and I think you feel licensed to sort of treat yourself.”

Carlson’s article is more in-depth than just the sampling included here, and covers other retailers Abercrombie & Fitch (and why you either love or hate it), and Costco. She also discusses how music and scents are connected to your moods and your purchasing habits.

Very well written, and certainly worth a few minutes.

AND: It just might save you $$$$ this weekend when, armed with this new knowledge, you manage to NOT buy that new duvet, some framed prints of fruit, or a ceramic monkey, despite thinking how nice they would look in your house.

Hey, you laugh now, but when you’re in the store later today, …you’ll be thanking me.

Dear Green Police: Make up your mind, would ya’??

When I was in high school and college, I worked at the local supermarket. Thus I am very familiar with the age-old question: “Paper, or plastic”?

Back in the 80’s, the switch was on to get away from the paper bags which were immensely popular, and replace them with a new, photo-degradable plastic bag. The bag was promised to be more environmentally friendly, would breakdown in sunlight, and we wouldn’t have to “cut down all the forests” for bags.

Even back then, such statements didn’t ring true to me. I was raised in a fairly rural part of New England, yet we had a paper company plant right in town. I was curious as to why, if the trees were a source of profit for the manufacturers (like our local paper plant), why would they be so stupid as to not replace their product source ? The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t, ’cause they’re not that stupid, and there are more trees now than there were 100 years go.

Anyway, back to bags. All the supermarkets started to use the new photo-degradable bags back then, and we were encouraged to steer people away from paper. By doing this we were repeatedly assured that we would be helping the environment.

And now we have this:

Los Angeles became the largest city in the nation to approve a ban on plastic bags at supermarket checkout lines, handing a hard-fought victory to environmentalists and promising to change the way Angelenos do their grocery shopping.

The City Council voted 13 to 1 to phase out plastic bags over the next 16 months at an estimated 7,500 stores, meaning shoppers will need to bring reusable bags or purchase paper bags for 10 cents each.

So let me get this straight: the same eco-weenies (or maybe by now it’s their kids) who were telling me 30 years ago that we should use the photo-degradable bags, and should steer folks away from paper bags, have done an about-face and are now saying that plastic, photo-degradable are so bad that they need to be completely banned, but they’ll “allow” you to buy the old paper ones for a dime, or you can bring a cloth bag?

Huh? Does this make sense? Does actual science back any of this up?

You can guess the answer by now:

“…In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags.

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….the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more 170 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

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Why is this? Because the environmental impacts of supermarket bags are dominated by the energy and raw materials needed to manufacture them. Plastic bags are inexpensive because relatively small amounts of energy and raw materials are needed to make them. These same attributes that make plastic bags affordable and light also make them easier on the environment than alternatives like paper bags and reusable cotton totes…” 

The article then goes on to explain why organic items in landfills don’t decompose any better than plastic bags (they become mummified) and also blows up the myth that plastic bags are bad because they’re rarely recycled:

Another common talking point about supermarket plastic bags is that they are rarely recycled, but this argument ignores the fact that a large portion of supermarket plastic bags (40% in the U.K.) are reused as garbage pail liners. Interestingly, the U.K. study found that it is better for the environment to reuse these bags as garbage pail liners rather than recycle them. This is due to the environmental “benefits of avoiding the production of the bin liners they replace.”

Just another in a verrrrry long series of times that the eco-libs got it wrong, again. It won’t make them slow down, of course: the eco-freaks are too convinced of their own importance.

And since I KNOW how important this is to them, this has become one of my biggest concerns out of self-defense. It’s also the reason why, far from making us laugh, this commercial from 2010 made my wife and I extremely uncomfortable.

‘Cause anymore, this no longer looks that unbelievable to me.