pantsfarm

I’ve fallen victim to the [tag]coupon[/tag] [tag]fallacy[/tag].

I mean, I don’t really know how coupons work, in the sense that I don’t understand what the motivation is to offer them. It makes reasonable sense to me how people ultimately end up using them, because they get the feeling of saving money and that makes people feel like they’re winning in their quest to stick it to the man or something.

If I had to guess, I’d assume that coupons are a good way for merchants to draw customers to their store. Perhaps once at the storefront or in the building or what have you, a person is more likely to buy more stuff, making up the difference that the store is losing by discounting their sales.

Of course, it might be that they’re simply trying to clear out some specific item for whatever reason, and coupons will drive sales of a specific item way up.

Suffice it to say, I don’t really know the common motivations for offering coupons, but that’s not really the point. One thing coupons do, in my experience, is convince people they are saving money.

This is simply not true. If you wanted to save money, you wouldn’t buy whatever it is you are buying. This obviously doesn’t apply in cases where you are buying something that you would have bought anyway. But convincing yourself that you would have bought it anyway and having that statement be true are entirely different things.

In my particular case, there was a promotion on Threadless.com and among what was in stock at the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed with a vast majority of them. But, I had this code to get a discount which expired on the 25th. Foolishly, I sat there trying to think of which ones I liked enough to get with the coupon. I failed to really consider that even with the coupon, I think given the availability at the time, that I would not like what I purchased so much. But in spite of this I managed to convince myself that I had to do it now, because otherwise I’d miss out on savings.

So, to “save” $15 I spent $30. That’s some excellent math right there. I did need some new t-shirts though, most of the ones I have now are entirely too big for me. This is not a particularly good excuse though.