So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 31) When you're somewhere between cleanliness and godliness
Hello! Let's start off with today's pop culture note, because it's the end of the week and we're all tired anyway.
So, we can all agree that this is pretty much the precursor to the artisanal cleaning lines of today? RIP, Jan Hooks, one of Saturday Night Live's most notable "straight woman in a sketch" players, and a graceful beat of continuity between Jane Curtin and Ana Gasteyer.
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In fitting tribute to fallen SNL players: I saw "Love Is A Dream" a few weeks ago when pop culture was having a Phil Hartman moment, and I watched it again tonight in honor of Jan Hooks. If you love 1950s movie musicals, you'll delight in how perfectly both Hartman and Hooks nailed the body language and expressions of those musical numbers.
And then, go spend a few minutes with "La Dolce Gilda" and "Don't Look Back In Anger." ("There's Bill Murray. He lived the longest -- 38 years.")
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So Amazon is opening a bricks-and-mortar outlet in NYC this holiday season. According to the WSJ: "A customer could, for example, order a pan in the morning and pick it up that evening in time to use for dinner... Amazon also may consider using the space to showcase inventory, particularly its devices like the Kindle e-readers, Fire smartphone or Fire TV set-top box, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking."
So what? This retail model is could do two things: To make the same-day pickup retail option seem intensely new and desirable (by making it a limited-engagement rollout in one market filled with media and retail types who all see it and think "BLOG POST!") and to see if shoppers can be trained to want and expect a retail experience that moves across multiple channels.
Who cares? Being able to capture customers by any means necessary is becoming the new holy grail of retail. Wal-Mart has tried to tackle the problem from the other angle (five years and counting!). The retailer has intuited (correctly) that price-sensitive and value-conscious shoppers have ways to jump on Amazon for a bargain. It's one thing for Amazon to hold the mindshare of "bargain-hunter's first stop" among online shoppers, but if they manage to build a fluid retail experience between online and offline shopping, Walmart's got headaches.
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The next time you go house-hunting, be aware of the mind games the seller is playing. Slightly overpricing a property can push its final sales price up thanks to something called the "anchoring effect," i.e. the phenomena where a person grabs on to the first piece of information and uses that as their baseline for all subsequent decisions. Similarly, it doesn't hurt to be aware of your own dumb brain: We're also prone to the fallacy of the sunk cost (i.e. feeling like you'll have "wasted" your time if you don't meet your goal) and vulnerable to valuing the need for closure above and beyond the objective value of the property we're about to buy.
(Speaking of closure, this piece beautifully articulates why maybe you shouldn't rush to put a tidy ending on an unpleasant experience: "We all come to early closure all the time, forming opinions about the behavior of others without sufficient consideration of all relevant facts. We become attached to the explanations that make the most sense from the perspective of our own experience and our own point of view. But this frequently leads to misunderstandings, sometimes with disastrous consequences.")
So what? If you're house-hunting, it'll help to have two sets of data: the comps for the area where you're looking and a chart showing how prices have been trending. This way, you can figure out whether that slightly-too-high price is because the seller is trying to mess with your head for fun and profit, or if they're genuinely in tune with the market trends. That'll eliminate at least one consumer psychology blind spot.
Who cares? Understanding the knee-jerk emotional processes that nudge us in one way or another while we're making a decision with significant financial consequences can help improve the likelihood of making a decision that has the least unpleasant long-term overall consequences.
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Have any of you forked out for the update to Tom Shales' & James Andrew Miller's Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live? Tell me via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.