The snob factor
Why are millennials so influenced by scarcity marketing?
As I’ve written before, Valentine’s Day is a day easily eclipsed by children once you have them. You gift them their little trinkets and chocolates, bag and deliver the valentines for school, maybe participate in a party or a little show. But I don’t mind. I receive my requisite bouquet from my husband and carry on. I have plans of my own. Plans to heed my own advice, become my own valentine, and treat myself to a gift living rent-free in my brain.
The Bar is restocking its oversized varsity sweatshirt collection on Valentine’s Day at 3pm EST. What is The Bar, you ask? A flirty and floofy luxury clothing brand that doesn’t quite make sense for me. Imagine you are 22 and trying to seduce someone, so you hit the town in a silky slip dress lined with feathers, lure them back to your apartment, and change into your varsity sweatshirt with no pants on. Both outfits are from The Bar. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I first saw the sweatshirt on Claudia Oshry, a 28-year-old mega-influencer whose content I consume enough to be influenced. The collection had been sold out for a while, and my feed nudges, pokes, and reminds me of this fact. I follow the Instagram account and tag two friends to enter a sweepstakes to win a box of the sweatshirts in every color. I lose. The Bar’s stories count down until the restock: one week, two days, 16 hours until our sweatshirts make their triumphant return. I feel compelled to put it on my calendar. None of this makes sense for me. Yes, I do love crewneck sweatshirts. But more than that, I love having something other people don’t have.
Scarcity increases demand. We should know—we all lived through it. Supply chain issues from the height of the pandemic still reverberate throughout the country and impact our lives today. I would never equate the visceral relief of securing paper goods or produce or Children’s Tylenol or baby formula with the hedonistic desire for a sweatshirt. But when rooted in something other than survival, why does scarcity influence some of us more than others?
Consumers want things that are scarce, because the uniqueness gained by having them is a means of differentiating themselves from others. The Journal of Retailing relates the need to be unique to a “snob effect,” whereby the demand for exclusive products decreases when more people consume them. Thus, the real marker of desirability is not mass adoption and consumption but rather uniqueness, which is driven by exclusivity imposed by the retailer. This is not the same as simply running out of a product. Whether scarcity is the consequence of a product’s organic popularity or constructed to appear that way by the brand, scarcity must be visible for it to matter. In other words, we have to keep being reminded that something is hard to get in order for us to care.
As our lives are driven by digital commerce, we see this play out every day. Our shopping carts tell us there are “only a few left!” and our apps offer exclusive merch drops at certain times and our Instagram Stories count down limited-edition releases and our TikTok algos feed us impossible-to-find tumblers in the colors we want most. Technology deploys scarcity as a marketing feature in subtle ways that compound to change our purchasing behavior. Social media plays a huge role here: we all hope to maintain a baseline of conformity but seek opportunities to demonstrate our uniqueness. It’s a flex. It’s the snob factor. But it’s life.
Millennials’ desire for scarcity is not new. Two examples from our childhood illustrate how early this concept was engrained into our habits. For one, Beanie Babies were the first toys I ever treated as collectibles. Everyone searched tirelessly for “first generation” and “rare” Beanie Babies. My mom still has the purple Princess Diana bear in a collector’s box in her house, holding out hope that it will matter someday. The other hot items were POGS, which at least we could play and trade at such a low cost point. Once, someone bought me a rare “OJ Simpson In The Slammer” slammer, which was truly an absurd cross-pollination of capitalism and current events.
But the barriers to participate were higher back then. We had to fit our frantic demands into the timeframe of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. We would call, wait, and call back again to check inventories. We stood in lines. Now, we barely have to move our bodies to engage in ravenous consumer behavior. My thumbs do all the work. I don’t even need to enter my address—my face confirms the purchase. The drop could be at midnight. I could be half unconscious and still get what I want.
The internet creates a slippery slope to indulge; but admittedly, it’s just a facilitator, not the reason I’m so susceptible. I’ve sought uniqueness since my early Twenties, when my favorite weekend activity was designer vintage hunting around New York City. I loved finding one-of-a-kind pieces and imagining their stories, never minding their imperfections. They made me feel special at a time when I was most feeling like a statistic. I don’t have access to any coping mechanisms like that now—I have malls. The Good Mall is 20 minutes away, and even when I go there, stores are half stocked. I rely on brand’s “edits,” my algos, and my 19-year-old babysitters to tell me where trends exist, because that’s what I have to work with in my limited time and capacity. And yes, maybe I do enjoy the little hit of dopamine that follows my successful purchase of a scarce product. It’s okay to admit that you do, too.
Back to Tuesday. Valentine’s Day. 3pm.
Pickup from school is in five minutes, and there is a cell reception dead zone on that exact block. I enlist my husband to perform a Valentine’s Day act of chivalry and purchase the sweatshirt from home on his laptop. But he has trouble loading our shipping address. The site is flooded—too many people. Now he’s invested, too. We’re clicking and refreshing, clicking and refreshing. Beige. No, red. Okay, beige. Whatever checks out. My daughter, now in tow, has no clue what’s going on. Apple Pay goes through—my adrenaline, my heart. I have two sweatshirts. I win.
A week later, they arrive in separate packages. I tear them open, and wow. They are terrible. As my friend denotes, “They are like sweatshirts we bought on the Ocean City boardwalk in high school.” This is true. I feel silly, but I don’t regret it. I will wear them both—I already have. And for the tiny joy in a brief time when I thought I’d be getting something special, I will probably do it again. Let’s hope next time I’ll be right.
Does a hot drop make you break into a cold sweat? Comment below or LMK: averagejoelle3@gmail.com.
The little things
I can’t conclude this week’s NL without showing you the sweatshirt. Here it is. I do look nice in red, but it bled all over the other one in the wash. Cool.
Also
I read:
No One Tells You The Full Truth About Pregnancy and Childbirth – Jezebel
Building, deconstructing, and rebuilding with clothes – The Cereal Aisle
MH370 Is A Cold Case. But It Can Still Be Solved. – New York Magazine
Is Nazi Loot Amid His 6,000 Oils, Some Grenades and Napolean’s Toothbrush? – The New York Times
I watched:
A docuseries about the cult leader who destroyed the lives of Sarah Lawrence students, and another about a South Carolinian murderer who thought his family was above the law until they weren’t. It was a dark content week.
Lisa Vanderpump on Watch What Happens Live discussing the #Scandoval. In the words of a young Gia Giudice, I’ve been waking up in the morning with so many thoughts in my head. I’ll probably address them next week.
I made:
A version of TikTok’s viral sushi bake, using a recipe from The Quicker Kitchen as reference. My flavors were on point, but make sure to use a thick cut of fatty salmon, and don’t skimp on buying tobiko, which I saw in one version of the dish and couldn’t kick from my mind that it wasn’t there.
I chose:
A winner at random for my Banza giveaway! Congratulations, ALEX! The rest of you can still get 15% off all on-site purchases with my code OTR23 until the end of the month.
Your wins
Jen and her daughter are home with ear infections, but instead of juggling through it, she took the day off—no calls, no interruptions—just to focus on them. Feel better!