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...research firm, estimates that cyber sales on Black Friday totaled $595 million, making it the second heaviest online spending day so far in 2009 and up 11% from Black Friday 2008. PayPal said it saw a 20% increase in the amount of money people spent using PayPal to purchase items this Black Friday from last year and a 140% spike in the volume of payments made by mobile phones. The mobile-phone transaction increase indicates that buyers shopping at brick-and-mortar sites were likely price-checking items with their mobile phones and then purchasing the item where they found...
...creature comfort. In her book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, writer Ellen Ruppel Shell devotes the better part of two chapters to how inexpensive goods mess with our minds. She describes one experiment in which researchers used brain scans to show that the joy of a discounted item comes before it's bought; by the time a person is at home with his new thing, the luster is gone. On Black Friday, I watched shoppers on TV proudly state how much they were saving on this and that. No one mentioned how much they were spending...
...Retailers across the board reported strong crowds early Friday, with high-definition televisions, laptops, winter coats and the popular toy Zhu-Zhu pets among the hottest items. "There were bargain-hungry shoppers out there, and retailers really did pull out all the stops for people," says Kathy Grannis, a spokesperson for the National Retail Federation, noting that many of the day's hot item carried the steepest discounts. (See TIME's 2009 holiday gift guide...
...Zhus selling so well? First, they cost less than $10, a price that is right for the times. This season, families are looking for small, low-cost collectible toys instead the big-ticket item. "There isn't a hell of a lot of high technology in the Zhu Zhu Pets," says Sean McGowan, a toy-industry analyst at Needham & Co. "That's how they are so damn affordable." (See pictures of people shopping on Black Friday...
Perhaps there is nothing concrete, no policy point or direct action item. But for me, when I acknowledged how competitive things actually are, my outlook shifted. Realizing the motivation of the snideness helped remove it from my psychology. My long-term success was not threatened by that of a peer, even if it seemed otherwise as I stared him down outside of the McKinsey interview. Somebody else’s failure in class would not somehow enhance my experience...