Another year, another Amazon Prime Day behind us. I watched with amusement as a number of news, life-hacking, and even personal finance websites I follow couldn’t withhold their excitement over the “red-hot” deals that Amazon was dishing out with their annual sale for Amazon Prime members.
Often times, their description of Amazon’s offers were represented as “Save (insert percentage or dollar amount) on (insert item).”
It’s easy to make the leap from “XYZ item is on sale” to “I’m saving XYZ if I buy this item today”.
In fact, Amazon customers reportedly made that leap over 100 million times this year, to the tune of an expected $3.6 billion.
But here’s the thing – for a true item of need, you wouldn’t be waiting for that magical day once per year when Amazon chooses which of it’s millions of items to randomly assign a discount to, just for the small chance hope that the item you need is one of them. No. If you truly needed the item, you’d already have it.
Therefore, you’re NEVER saving money on anything you buy on Amazon Prime Day. You’re spending money on something you didn’t need in the first place and wouldn’t have bought otherwise.
And that’s what Amazon Prime Day does. Through the psychology of “discount scarcity” (here today, gone tomorrow), you’re given permission to pull a Jedi mind trick on yourself by masking a bad behavior (buying something you don’t need) with what is typically a good behavior (saving money). And it’s a trick that many of us eagerly and willingly fall for.
I’m picking on Amazon here, but Amazon Prime Day is not alone. It joins Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the many “hurry, this best-ever, limited-time sale won’t last forever” sales that almost every retailer hooks their customer base with every few weeks or months. We’re conditioned to this cycle, yet we fall for it time and time again. And it’s no small coincidence that the average household has over 300,000 items.
The only true “savings” from a sale come from discounts on items you actually need to buy. For example:
- When the grocery items you normally buy are discounted (in which case, stock up as much as you logistically can!).
- Your tires need replacement and a local tire retailer just happens to be running a “Buy 4, get $100 off” promo.
- Your socks have holes in them, you go to the store to buy some new ones, and all socks are 20% off.
Those are true savings.
In fact, with Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other retail sales, the stuff that they are most likely to discount is the stuff that is heavily overstocked (supply far exceeded demand). So it’s REALLY stuff you don’t need. It’s the retailer’s garage sale, if you will.
In short, don’t fall for these sales gimmicks. Learn how to label your purchases correctly, control your wants, and only buy the stuff you need to buy when you need to buy it. If it’s randomly on sale at the time you buy it, great! If not, so be it. You may think that missing out on a sale is no fun – buy buyer remorse is always worse.
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Could not agree with you more…spot on…
Wholeheartedly agree. On prime day I searched for everything we need in the house and use on a regular basis. None of it was on sale. Lame! But I could get a 4K Tv for half the price. Awesome! Oh wait I already have a perfectly working tv.
Ah, but if you need and use on a regular basis and didn’t currently have, was it really a “need”? ;-)
I mostly agree with you on this principle, but this year on Prime Day some items were so heavily discounted I was able to buy them and easily flip them for a profit.
Can you walk me through an example of an item that you’ve already resold and the net profit on it (- shipping/selling costs)?
Curious what that would look like. And how did you know you’d be able to profit prior to selling? I feel like if something was that deeply discounted, others would have caught on too and EBay would be flooded with re-sellers.
I also worry about eBay being flooded with discounted items, so I usually don’t do this, but these offers were just too good to pass up. In order to get these prices, I used a promotion where redeeming 1 Amex point gave me an additional discount on top of the Prime Day pricing. I’m sure the overwhelming majority of the public didn’t know about it, which helped, but it was all over the various deal sites. The 3 different items I bought and sold went as follows (estimates from memory, I know the numbers aren’t exactly right, but close enough):
FIRE 7 TABLET, quantity 5, sold as a lot of 5 for $190 on eBay
Expenses: $53 including tax for the products (80% off), $19 for eBay fee, $6 PayPal fee, $17 shipping
Profit: $95
FIRE 8 HD TABLET, quantity 5, sold as a lot of 5 for $270 on eBay
Expenses: $106 including tax for the products (75% off), $27 eBay fee, $12 PayPal fee, $15 shipping
Profit: $110
KINDLE E-READER, quantity 5, sold as lot of 2 for $100 on eBay
Expenses: $21 including tax for the products (88% off), $10 eBay fee, $5 PayPal fee, $0 shipping (same buyer as Fire HD 8, lucky me)
Profit: $64
Total profit: $269
If I had to do it again I’d buy the max number of tablets (5 of each color, 25 total Fire 7 and 25 total Fire HD 8). I only bought 5 each in black, but I did buy the max of 2 Kindle e-readers. I was nervous about being able to sell them all, but now that I see how quickly they sell on eBay I’d scale up next time. I listed them for less than others were selling them for so they’d sell quickly, and sold them each as a lot to make it easier for me. I’d rather make a little less money than have them sitting around collecting dust for awhile, or have to ship them to many different buyers.
That’s about it! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Certainly an accurate depiction. I was hoping this story was going to be about the outright fake “sale” items. Camelcamelcamel.com, a website that tracks Amazon prices, brought me to my senses on a few tempting items. None of the items I looked at were going for a better price than they had already offered in the last few months and a few items could have been purchased cheaper a few weeks earlier.
This year’s prime day was also a lot different than usual. Instead of a genuine list of sale items, seemingly anything you’ve browsed in the past (or related items) was on a list that offered a few percent off the regular price. 3% savings isn’t really what I think of when I think “buy now!”
Yes, there is the “raise list price and discount to old price” gimmick as well, which Amazon is really good at. I also use camelcamelcamel to check against this.
These sort of tactics are pretty sly – I wish that these offers were genuine. You sometimes get it in shops as well (at least in the UK). A shop will put up the price of some items in one or two stores in a remote part of the country in order to “qualify” to discount it heavily in other stores from the over-inflated price.
There is a high people get when they think they got a “good deal”. My wife is a great example of this, she keeps a few receipts of her clothes shopping outings as trophies. They bring her some sort of joy by looking at the “savings” number located at the bottom. To think of it, I think the receipts have outlasted some of the items. Now, I don’t mean to chastise her, I think she does a pretty good job not buying on impulse, buying off season, and she has this app that tracks the pricing on items she wants which she scoops up when they drop below a price she deems reasonable. She always likes to tell me how much she saved which I always reply “you could have saved more if you didn’t buy it,” but whatever she buys (provided it is within that month’s budget) is a price I’m willing to accept to see her happy..
Kinda sounds like someone is upset the items they wanted didn’t go on sale….
I picked up a couple items and used my normal price tracking tools to verify the price was a deal.
Amazon has this great tool called a list where you can save items for later and check to see if their price has dropped.
Overall on 3 items saved 25% over the 3C’s lowest recorded price on items we were in the market to buy anyways…So yeah just a scam. *rolling eyes*
Cool. Congrats on your huge haul.
I’m in the minority & don’t buy often on Amazon but sometimes I do buy on these super sale days as gifts for friends/family members. I shop all year for Xmas gifts so if I see a good gift item on sale in July, I jump on it. One cannot always assume the price will be lower in Nov/Dec. In the past I waited & the item was out of stock until after the holidays. Buying early on sale works for me when it comes to buying gifts.
Amazon Prime Day is just another day of savings on Amazon (which is everyday). They may have some more expensive tech on sale, like headphones or speakers, but otherwise, you’re not saving much.
While there is truth in your position it isn’t entirely true either. For both prime day and black friday type deals I am generally buying things that I was intending on buying anyway, but I delayed my purchase until the “deal day” knowing that such items were highly likely to go on sale. For some other items on those days I had general types of items that I needed (such as birthday and christmas gifts) without a specific item necessarily in mind and it was through taking advantage of the deals that I got items that were very well liked by their recipients for far less than I would have if I went christmas/birthday shopping absent those deals.
So if you’re looking at it as “If I buy X on sale I am saving money” you’re right, that’s bs. But if you look at it as “I intend to buy X sometime soon but I’m going to see if I can get it discounted during a sale period” then you absolutely save money buying on such deals.