Black Friday ’21 and the art of tackling impulse purchases!
I love Black Fridays! Huge discounts and great deals everywhere, on every product — physical and digital.
While so many people end up buying a bunch of things, this Black Friday, I decided to take a different approach to purchases.
An impulse purchase is a mean vice. As the tax season is right around the corner, I tell myself to not cave in.
Still, you cannot entirely escape impulse buying, so what you can do is — delay it creatively.
And that’s what I did!
As we entered Friday, I started browsing through Amazon.
Boy, what an amazing experience it is when you see discounts everywhere!
The rush is beautiful. Browse any category, and the discounts would be soaring!
I suppose it makes sense to call it Black Friday since it does tend to burn a black hole in your pocket.
Anyway, as I continued browsing, I realised, there are too many things out there that I could buy. So I decided to delay my impulse.
I decided to make a list of everything that I am considering.
In approx. 3 hours of browsing, I came up with this list:
- double-walled glass mug
- watch
- bar speakers
- deo
- panda mug
- shirts for men
- hoodies for men
- flip feature phone
- graphic novels
- smart watch
- bed sheet
- feather fountain pen
- notepad
- trackpants
- coffee
- coffee filter
- moka pot
- edgar allan poe hardcover collection
- hoodie by hm_man
- Shoe rack
- feature phone
- ps5
- ps4
- Cheap watches
- oral b e brush head
That’s right, I had 26 items on my Black Friday shopping list.
If I could go nuts, I probably would.
By then, the clock had struck 2.30 am, and I decided I must sleep on it.
Also, it was only Thursday the 25th (which I realised only the next morning after I woke up).
The next morning, I discussed the list with my girlfriend. We realised that some list items were hilarious. She did warn me to not give in to the darned impulse, and suggested I delay the purchases even further!
Thus, as what happens when two MBAs discuss lists, we decided that the list should be converted into an excel sheet with two more columns. She suggested a column for ‘desire’ and I added another one, a column for ‘need’.
It’s funny how Black Friday, in her sly and seductive manner, continued to hold ground in our headspaces!
We decided that I should add scores for each of the list items on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of the desire and need I have for them.
You might be thinking — well, what’s the difference between the two?
Do not worry, as your friendly, passionate product manager, I must remove any ambiguity you might have in terms of their definitions! :)
Need: The items that I need, which will solve my daily life problems.
Desire: The items that I might not need, but still desire to own, because I am enamoured by them.
Thus, the list with scores for need and desire now looked like the following:
You might think — okay, now he has the top 7 items which he should buy.
Here’s the catch: The whole point of delaying purchases was to ensure I don't waste my money!
Therefore, I should add a factor that valued the deals and discounts.
Bam! Another column appears: The Deal Value column, to be scored as per the following:
- 1–2: If an item has a discount below 25%
- 2–4: If an item has a discount in the range of 25% to 50%
- 5: If an item has a discount above 50%
Just to spice things up, if an item is non-returnable, I will deduct 3 points from its cumulative priority score (CPS).
So now, I have the top 5 items that I can consider buying.
Here’s an interesting anecdote: Whenever in the past few months I had an impulse, I channelised it into buying a stock or a crypto coin.
However, the recent crypto plunge has run some of my crypto investments into losses, which is why, I decided to not try this approach and instead, serve myself with a nice assortment of juicy, oven-fresh Black Friday purchases.
So naturally, being the responsible product manager that I am, I decided to delay the purchases further and put these 5 items into a quadrant (hehe).
Items in the ‘low price high CPS’ region will be prioritised the most, followed by the ones in the ‘high price high CPS’ regions.
The ones in the remaining two regions (low price low CPS, high price low CPS) can go off the list.
You might think that the prices are not comparable since the utilities of these things are different.
But this is where you must understand that like all good things in life, this medium post must come to an end and like any cool side-project, this excel sheet should have an outcome.
As a result, I now have my final list of items that I am going to purchase this Black Friday!!
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