“Great Savings for the Holidays on Bissell” said the Amazon.com home page this week. (Category: vacuum.)
The Estée Lauder Anti-Wrinkle Essentials Value Set was a “gift of the day” on the Macys.com holiday beauty page. Among the site’s other head-scratching holiday deals: $50 off a Sonicare electric toothbrush. (Down to $129.)
All were aimed at a particular type of holiday shopper: the self-gifters — people who cannot resist taking advantage of the frenzied seasonal sale wars to buy a few things for themselves. (Those “buy one, get one free offers” are particularly potent bait.)
Even the classic gift of affection for others — jewelry — is fair game, and retailers know it. Under the banner Black Friday Jewelry Deals, Macy’s website coaxed: “This holiday season, get an unforgettable gift for a loved one (or yourself). Black Friday jewelry is a go-to choice for the ultimate present under the tree.”
A number of studies show that since the recession, and even a year or two before, self-gifters have been growing in both numbers and the dollars they spend. Perhaps these shoppers have reasoned that big sales offer the only legitimate excuse to spend for themselves — or in years when their finances were improving, they were finally able to ease up enough to splurge on something.
Whatever the motivation, they’ve become a special demographic niche that retailers depend on heavily, so much so that many preholiday shopping surveys now track them. But some recent surveys suggest this year that these shoppers may be a feeling a little less indulgent — a worrying prospect for companies heading into a season already filled with uncertainty and weak sales projections.
Prosper Insights Analytics, a consumer intelligence firm that conducts surveys on holiday spending for the National Retail Federation, for example, found that a smaller share of holiday shoppers planned to take advantage of discounts to buy “nongift items” for themselves or their family this holiday season, compared with last year or the year before.
Given that impulse-buying promotes self-gifting, retailers will be doing everything they can this year — overtly, subtly and even subliminally — to tempt people to be more like Robert Kissell of Nags Head, N.C.
Mr. Kissell, 25, is an incurable self-gifter. When the stores open Thanksgiving night and Black Friday morning, he will be on the chase for a 60-inch LED smart TV at Walmart that he says will be on sale for $688, a slow cooker at Ace ($15), an Android tablet at Kmart ($39) and a whole bunch of Blu-ray discs at Target.
He plans to keep every one for himself.
Mr. Kissell hastens to add that he has a wife, parents and others for whom he is also plotting to buy great presents. But the reality is that the number of people on anyone’s gift list — and the general amount they will spend on each — is, in economists’ terms, fairly inelastic. It simply doesn’t vary that much from year to year.
For retailers, the potential for growth is greater with self-gifters because personal wants or domestic needs know fewer limits. And they can be justified as a smart household budget move.
Hence the vacuum cleaner strategy — or as Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a research and consulting firm, describes it, promoting items that really aren’t gifts.
“How many people are you going to buy a big-screen TV for?” asked Mr. Cohen. “That item is not necessarily a gift-giving item.” Retailers, he said, “create it so the price point is so attractive” that it is very easy to rationalize buying it for yourself or even as “a family gift.”
“You are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t wait to see what’s available,” said Mr. Kissell. “The discounts really are worthwhile,” he continued, adding, “I would never buy a TV the other 10 months of the year.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 29, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a subscription website that offers 30 days free shipping, with the clock starting with your first purchase. It is Rue La La, not Rulala.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 29, 2013
A picture caption with an earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly the name of town in North Carolina. It is Nags Head, not Nag’s Head.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/business/retailers-sly-message-get-yourself-something-too.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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