Shop at any cost till you drop

THE Black Friday fever, an affliction that has its origin in the US, is catching on in India as well. Newspapers in some of the bigger cities carried large advertisements in the last week of November of special ‘sales’ to mark this event. In America, this is the day when shoppers go into a discount-driven frenzy to buy whatever they can lay their hands upon. We have not reached that level of hysteria yet, but we are definitely getting there.

In any case, we are still in the traditional festive season when shopping acquires the aura of an essential ritual. The markets are abuzz with activity. For those who have something to sell, this is a critical time. They would have racked their brains in the past few months to get an answer to the make-or-break question: Why do people (especially women) buy what they do? Fortunes are made or lost, companies survive or die, products go out of stock or remain unsold, depending on whether the seller has got his answer to this question right or wrong.

It is obviously not necessity that always motivates buyers. Gandhiji may have lamented that the world had “enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed”, but that is not how modern commerce works. In fact, if Bapu’s advice were to be followed to the letter, most of the economies of the developed world would spiral into recession.

So, I travelled far and wide; I talked to sages and seers to find out if there was a clear answer to this question. I saw the mad rush at Black Friday sales in the US — where everyone feels that to take part in this scramble is a holy rite that has to be gone through at least once in a lifetime — and wondered why.

I also realised that if the word ‘discount’ is added in a sales campaign, it drives buyers everywhere into a frenzy, even if the prices have already been hiked to accommodate a rebate. In the festive season, it is the principle that matters. So, with the credit card in hand and the moment of reckoning deferred — even if by a month — women (and some men, too) plunge headlong into the maelstrom of retail commerce.

Eventually, after a long quest, with the kind of epiphany that made Archimedes bolt out of his bathtub, I finally cracked the mystery and got the answer to the riddle, “Why people buy?” I recalled the answer British mountaineer George Mallory gave when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it is there.”

That is as good a reason as any for shopping.