Hard Sell Urgency/Scarcity Leads to Death
Friday, November 28th, 2008Sorry for this day-after-Thanksgiving darkness, but a major story on various Internet news sites this morning caught our attention making a powerful hard sell point:
Judith saw a Wal-Mart ad on AOL indicating a Black Friday sale.
The original meaning of the term “Black Friday”came from a market crash in September, 1869, when some financiers failed to corner the gold market. The crash was followed by a depression. So Black Friday came to generally mean a day when a public calamity occurs
More recently, the term Black Friday refers to the day after Thanksgiving during which retailers create discounted sales and make enough sales to put themselves “into the black ink.”
The Wal-Mart ad indicated that the sale would begin at 5 AM and last until 11AM that morning, and that prices would be seriously discounted during that window.
By limiting the buying time, Wal-Mart purposely manufactured urgency and ratcheted up the frenzy by limiting the discounts to only that period creating a manufactured scarcity.
And the result?
Wal-Mart shoppers break down the doors of a store on Long Island, NY, to rush in for their Black Friday discounts, and a worker is trampled to death.
