A three-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough flying miles to send an airline into losses (well almost!). Job with a foreign consulting company. Annual salary of Rs 30 lac…or around 45-times India’s average per capita income. Yet my friend Rohan is not happy.
Whenever I meet him, he is, as I put it, caught on the “work-spend treadmill.”
So, just two days back, when he was showing off his latest purchase, a fourth mobile, and one costing in excess of Rs 45,000, I asked him, “You really need one more?”
“It was selling cheap on Flipkart, and so I bought,” he replied.
I knew that handset was Rs 5,000 cheaper on some other website as my other friend had bought it very recently. But then, how do you explain that to someone who bought stuff not because he wanted it, but because “it was selling so cheap and everyone else was buying like crazy!”
I have countless other stories like Rohan’s, where people bought stuff from Flipkart on its Big Billion Day – not because they needed stuff, but because things were selling cheap (at least that was what Flipkart communicated well) and they wanted to buy because others were buying, and before others could buy what they wanted.
[Read more…] about Online Shopping, Investing, and Why We Get Fooled