Steel Notes Magazine December 2016 | Page 114

Steel Notes Magazine www . steelnotesmagazine . com
Steel Notes Magazine
December 2016

Alessia Bastianelli – Italy

Venice 11.26.2016

Are you ready for shopping ?

Christmas is coming and some people have already started to buy gifts ; others , like me , will wait until the last minute . The stores are ready for Christmas , with all sorts of offers , discounts , promotional sales , etc . Surely each of us believes ourselves to be capable of properly evaluating the economic offers relating to particular items . But is this actually true ? Let ’ s look at some examples .
In general , when we evaluate the price of an item , our objectivity is lacking . One would think that we as consumers assign a value to an item by adding up the value of all of the object ’ s features , such as material , options , size , color , quality , etc . Actually , the assigned value is not obtained by simply summing the value of each feature . Rather , we assign a certain weight to each feature , and to each weight we assign an intrinsic value based on how important the feature is to us . In this way , some features will have a greater assigned weight than others ; it is these features that push us to buy the item .
How many of us have ever foregone purchasing a lower-priced item in favor of a very similar yet more expensive item , just because it had a certain feature that we could not live without ? We ’ ve all done this at least once . Just think about all of the times we buy items only for their brand . More often , the most important thing is not whether the price of an item fairly reflects its value , but rather , the impression that the price makes on us . If the price is very low , usually the quality of the item is perceived as low . But if we perceive the price as too high , we will think it is excessive , even if it is perfectly reasonable given the characteristics of the object for sale .
Discounts are a separate topic of discussion . When we have to choose either an offer that gives 50 % more of the product or one that gives a 50 % discount on the product , usually we think there is no difference . In fact , in this situation , our brains have instinctively evaluated the two offers as being exactly the same . But this is not correct . As Derek Thompson of the Atlantic explained , “ You walk into a Starbucks and see two deals for a cup of coffee . The first deal offers 33 % extra coffee . The second takes 33 % off the regular price . The deals appear to be equivalent , but in fact , a 33 % discount is the same as a 50 percent increase in quantity . But , let ’ s say the standard coffee is $ 1 for 3 quarts ($ 0.33 per quart ). The first deal gets you 4 quarts for $ 1 ($ 0.25 per quart ) and the second gets you 3 quarts for 66 cents ($. 22 per quart ).
According to Thompson , there are two broad reasons for why these kind of tricks

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