The Season of Giving or the Season of Buying?

After reading my class mate Vanessa's blog about why we buy gifts for our loved ones I started thinking bout how I buy gifts for my friends and family. Ive noticed I always have planned to get get my loved ones small gifts as December approaches. Being a college student without a lot of expendable cash, I often just make every ones gifts by hand. Most times however by the time Christmas day rolls around I have doubled the original amount I was originally planning on spending for each persons gift. So why does this happen?

Looking at my own self I think that I start small, shopping online and around town, then I start searching for that perfect gift. Soon enough I find it but it's out of my price range so I make one exception. then I feel bad about spending more on one family member than another and son enough everyone is getting bigger and better gifts. I think this happens to everyone but just with different causes so if you are falling victim to this over spending on gifts let me know in the comments along with what you think causes it.

Are Advertisers Hurting Themselves.

As we all know, having gone through almost an entire semester of consumer behavior, There are more ads in today's world than ever before. with people seeing as many as 5,000 ads a day we have been asked this semester how we can cut through the clutter? I pose a different question are advertisers going to far? As we are sent ever increasing amounts of messages, as consumers, are we going to hit a point where we ignore all the messages we see.


There are already many types of messages that nearly everyone ignores, such as banner ads, so will there come a time when this happens to all types of advertising? I realize that advertisers are constantly discovering new vessels to transport their message whether its on video games, product placement in our favorite movies or subliminal messages. But speaking from my own point of view I already ignore almost every ad I see. It gets about two seconds for me to see what its advertising and if I'm confused or not interested it is out of my mind. What is your opinion are ads ever going to be entirely ignored or will the advertisers always be able to find a way into our minds.

Always Listening

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned a relatively new Amazon product called the Amazon Echo. I find this product very interesting and a little creepy. Typically this device is placed in one's kitchen or living room, if onewants, one can get an aditional "dot" and place it in every room. When one says "Alexa" it starts listening. One can ask it any question and it will google answers, or one can have it turn on music, even make online purchases for you. In the picture below is a list from Amazon of other suggested uses.

When I first heard about this I was kind of creeped out, I don't know much about the technical side of computers but it seems to me if someone, for example a burglar, wanted to hack this device and listen to all of one's conversations, they could find out when one is going to be gone and whether or not one has a security system. It seems to me there could potentially be a lot of problems that come along with this device and the more you connect it to your house the more danger it poses if it does get hacked.

On the other hand just the other day one of my classmates was telling me he had read articles about how our phones are constantly listening to us. Then another student at the table said she is often talking about a certain movie and then she will see adds for that movie the next time she is on her phone, and yet we all have a phone so maybe this product wouldn't be any different. I do think this is a very cool product that would be very useful, but I probably won't be getting one anytime soon. Do you think the Echo is a possible danger, or just a use full tool that makes life easier?

How Not to do Sales

One of my favorite clothing stores is Eddie Bauer Their products are extremely durable and comfortable they re however quite expensive. So when I first started shopping there if I wanted to buy something I would wait, and only buy if I could get if for 30% off or more. However, I started to notice that every time I go into their store or get a catalog from them it seems everything in the store is always 30-40% off. Over the past four months I've been in the store once and received two catalogues from them, and wouldn't you know 30-40% off every time.

In case you were wondering this is
terrible sales practise. The purpose of a sale is to get people excited about getting your products for a cheaper price and bring in more business. By having a store wide sale for months at a time you are just sending the message to your customers that the real price of you products are when they are marked 30% off.

This creates a problem now for them because if their other customers like me find their products to expensive I now only make purchases from them if I can find items marked down by at least 40%, even then I feel as though after realizing these facts I am less likely to buy from them.

If they want to fix this it is my opinion that they need to lower the regular price on the products, and when they do have sales only sell certain items at discounted prices, rather than everything in the store.

The Big Nudge

Its that time of year again where every store one visits seems to be having it's biggest sale ever, and everyone is constantly scouring the Internet and searching store to store for the best deals. Sense 1952 Black Friday has marked the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Everyone knows that black Friday can get crazy, sense 2006 there have been seven reorted deaths and 98 injuries, but in my oppinion it is probably one of the greatest nudges that has ever been implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)

All of these store are advertising about how much money consumers are going to save if they buy products on black Friday, and the consumers eat it up. But if you are spending money even if you get something 50% off you are still spending, which is the opposite of saving. The mannor in which all of these stores and online site frame their advertising is fooling consumers into spending money where they souldn't and because they get such good deals they buy fancier items than they normally would and end up spending more than normal anyway.

Will Amazon Take Over

What started as a site to get books online for cheap prices, and a company that took over a decade to turn a profit has now turned into the largest online retailer in the world. Although their sales aren't as high amazon is already valued at 120 billion dollars more than Wal-mart is, and Wal-mart is 32 years older. Anyone remember the book retailer Boarders? because it was amazon who drove them out of business, and now many are questioning if malls are going to be next.

Amazon now sells just about anything you can think of, and if you are a Prime member you can get most items in just two days. For many people, including myself, it is much easier to order something on amazon and have it brought right to my door than it is to drive to any given store and hope they have what I need.

You'll also notice that if you are a Prime member you now get Prime Music and Video. Prime video is a similar service to Netflix and Hulu. and Prime Music give access to many songs for free and the rest can be purchased just like on iTunes. They also released  new product last year called the Amazon Echo that is essentially a better version of Seri that you place in your home and can speak to.

There are still many people who like to go out and see items in person or try them on before they buy, but even a few years ago i could never have imagined buying certain items online, such as TVs or musical instruments, and now these items are common place buys on the Internet. So who can say what we will be buying on amazon in the future. What is your opinion will amazon eventually become dominant in all industries as it has the book store?

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/07/22/jeff-bezos-amazon-ceo-world-domination-479508.html

Is Language really Worse than Violence

Spoiler Alert: If you are a fan of The Walking Dead and you haven't seen the first episode of season 7 you should turn back now.

For those of you who have ever watched the TV series the Walking Dead you'll notice that the characters in the show, although in the most terrifying and dangerous situations, very rarely use obscene language. This is due to the fact that AMC doesn't play R rated movies or TV series without editing them. However, if you have seen this series you'll undoubtedly have noticed it is extremely gruesome and violent, and in my opinion even more so than the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. But in the latest season of The Walking Dead the writers really out did themselves, by showing not one, but two of the main characters getting their heads smashed by a man with a baseball bat. On one hand I give props to the makeup and special effects crews for making the scene looks so realistic, but on the other hand this was not something I wanted to see, or for that matter could even believe they allowed on TV. Keep in mind the series is rated TV-14.

This led me to question why people are so quick to protect kids from the "bad" language that they no doubt use and hear with their peers on a daily basis, and yet no one has a problem with the extremely graphic violence in these TV shows. In my opinion the extreme violence in these shows is as bad or worse than bad language, and eventually the rating system will have to be updated or the shows will have to showcase less graphic scenes. Anyway, if you scroll down you can see the image of this graphic death below.....



                                                                                                                                                             

Just kidding! This is a Lego parody someone made, if you really want to witness this scene you can go on YouTube and search "Glenn and Abraham's death." If you do, let me know what your thoughts on the matter were. Do you think that kind of violence on TV is okay?





http://www.cosmicbooknews.com/sites/default/files/lego-walking-dead-glenn-abraham-death.jpg