"It was reduced"

The bag in chapter 1 cost sixty-eight pounds. Suppose the page had said it was down from a hundred and ten. For a lot of us that would have settled it, and we'd have told the story afterwards as one about saving forty-two pounds.

The economist Richard Thaler gave this a name in 1985. He suggested that a purchase gives two separate pleasures. One comes from the thing itself. The other comes from the deal, the gap between what you paid and what you think the thing normally costs. He called the second one transaction utility. A good deal feels good in itself, apart from whatever you bought.

Once you see the two pleasures separately, the trouble is obvious. The pleasure of the deal can attach to anything at all. It'll attach to a bag you don't need as easily as to a boiler you do. And it's strongest on the evenings when you were after a lift anyway, because it adds a little sense of cleverness to the sense of control.

The arithmetic is simple. If you buy a bag for sixty-eight pounds, you have sixty-eight pounds less than you had. Whether you've saved anything depends on one thing only, which is whether you'd have bought that bag at full price. If you would, you're forty-two pounds up. If you wouldn't, then you've spent sixty-eight pounds, and the hundred and ten is only what somebody chose to print on the page.

You'll notice that "would I have bought it at full price?" is the chapter 5 question again. A thing you wanted yesterday, at its ordinary price, is a bargain when it's reduced. A thing you didn't want yesterday is no bargain, however much has been knocked off.

Remember Mathur's timers too. A fair number of the deadlines on those sites weren't real. The reduction that ends at midnight is often there again on Thursday.

None of this makes sales bad. They're the best time to buy things you've already decided on, and that's one of the main uses of the list I'll describe in chapter 15. If the coat you've wanted since last winter drops by a third in January, buy it and enjoy both pleasures. What makes it a good buy is that the wanting came first and the discount came after. With a lift purchase it's the discount that comes first, and the wanting is put together on the spot to fit it.