Why Did I Buy This???

I have always had an interest in marketing because at heart it's all about tricking people into making irrational decisions; like eating Butterfinger candybars. People, c'mon, they suck... and if you like them you probably know they suck but eat them anyway. But see, if you take this barely edible confection and market it properly you can actually coax people into eating this garbage. I admit that back in my younger days I would periodically buy Butterfingers ONLY because I was a huge Simpsons fan and they were the "faces of the brand".

This same thing goes on in any number of fields. For example; why do I have Hellman's mayonaisse in my fridge right now? Would I even know if somebody had put Kraft mayo on my ham and cheese sandwich? Why do people keep buying Nikes? I haven't seen a new Nike shoe that wasn't competely ass-fugly in about 4 years, yet the company has not gone under. Nice commercials though.

The art of getting you to make unnecessary purchases goes beyond the tube and the radio. I'm sure we've all seen those shows detailing how supermarkets get you to buy a whole bunch of unneeded crap by making it impossible to tell how long you've been in the store and putting the most expensive/most recognized stuff at eye level... going so far as to put male-targeted products slightly higher than female-targeted products on the shelves. This stuff is really quite shady and is probably asking for some kind of massive class-action lawsuit against Shop Rite; but I'm getting off my nearly non-existent point.

So I trekked over to Best Buy a few days ago because I wanted to pick up the new Coldplay (Biggest band in the world!1!!1!1!) and White Stripes (Weirdest quasi-meanstream-not-that-popular-but-well-known band in the world!1!1!1) albums, which were conveniently displayed in the "Hot This Week" section advertising a markdown to $10 as opposed to the $14-$17 it would eventually evolve into for some silly evil-marketer reason. So I pick those two up, but before I can escape the evil clutches of Captain Industry the 3rd big debut of that week catches my eye.

Now I also have the previous release by the Black Eyed Peas for some reason (well, note that I didn't say that I bought the previous release) and thought it wasn't that great. The 2-3 songs that everyone heard 14 million times were ok, but the rest of the album wasn't anything special in my opinion. Despite this, the lure of purchasing 2 or 3 entertaining songs for $10 had hooked me. Now if Best Buy had just arranged their CDs in alphabetical order there is no way in hell that I would own something called "Monkey Business" right now.

In the end the CD is ok in that "This is a Black Eyed Peas album so you knew what you were getting out of this" way, but I resent the fact that I was Jedi mind-tricked into buying it. Screw you Best Buy.