I was at the supermarket today and they had these large watermelons for sale. At the same time I was walking past the pre-cut fruit section and saw how those small package of watermelon were like the same price but you get so much less. Literally, if you simply bought a whole one and cut it yourself you could probably make like five boxes of them. The person I was with was then saying those were targeting people who simply don’t have the time to cut the stuff themselves.

While that is understandable to a certain extent, I was thinking to myself……how much labor is it really to cut something like a watermelon? The person then told me that for how much you save in this case he would find time to do it if he were one of those people who normally wouldn’t as people make too much money this way. That’s interesting I thought where if you think about the motivation to save money in this case isn’t so much about saving money but rather one feeling like they are being taken advantage of.

The more I think about it this can even be true with things like a real estate agent as many people tell me that they sell their own home not so much because of the potential financial savings but rather they can’t stand someone making so much for what seems to be so little effort. If that is the simple psychology to get people to try and do as much as they can themselves to save money I was thinking how watching documentaries or even instructional type of shows about various industries regularly can probably make people more savvy financially.

It almost sounds too simple but makes sense in many ways. Come to think of it, I have watched a lot informational kind of shows which were more about how certain industries work which indirectly made me more aware of what I buy and what is a reasonable price to pay. Maybe that will work for others as well.

About a week ago I was talking to a person about money and how just talking about the future can trigger a lot in your mind to the point where you will continually make good financial decisions. The example that was used was let’s pretend you were offered two choices in getting a free gift certificate for a store. You were told that if you take the offer right now you would get $20 and if you wait about two weeks you would get $50. So the question was which one would you take?

To me I obviously said the $50 as it sounded like it made more sense in the long-run. He was then saying of course people like myself would choose that. However, he was expressing how for this test if you actively engage people in conversations about what they plan to do in say the next week or two beforehand they will more than likely choose the $50 based simply on the notion that they are thinking about something in regards to their future. For people who usually don’t surround themselves in conversations such as those apparently they are more likely to simply go for the immediate gratification route.

That’s interesting I thought. If you think about it too this doesn’t mean you have to get people to talk about money or finance specifically. Instead, it could be a simple topic such as what are they planning to do for fun next week or talking about say where they plan to visit for their next vacation. The more I think about it the more this makes sense too I suppose for myself as I am usually always thinking about the future regardless of what topic category it may be.

Not a bad concept to take away I say especially if you are trying to find ways to teach like say a child on how to save money or how sometimes waiting a little can result in getting better rewards in the future.

This was kind of funny but I suppose it is probably more true than most of us think. Basically, there are often items that people are too embarrassed to let people know that they are buying. This could be items in the supermarket that are related to say sex or it could be a situation like a wife telling the husband to buy her some female related items which he feels weird putting in the shopping cart and having to explain it’s not for him. Because of this I was reading how people are willing to go to stores that specifically have self checkout terminals or to simply buy it online even though this meant having to pay a lot more.

Sure makes you think especially as the business on how many times you are losing a sale because a person is too embarrassed to go through a regular cashier huh? At the same time, it makes me wonder if I would be ever wiling to pay say double for a product because of these types of scenarios.

While reading through this e-mail pitch today this one phrase seemed to have stuck on my mind where a person was trying to convince people to buy his service by explicitly using the phrase that you should invest in you future if you are serious about your business. Do you find that phrase works a lot on you?

For myself I tend to be a little sceptical when people use that phrase mainly because I recognize it’s an emotional string of sort to get you to take action. In general it probably is more effective though than say trying to edify your product or service like crazy. I guess at the end of the day this emphasizes that in any literature it should be more about what your product or service can do for people as oppose to how good it is.

I did find this semi strange over the past few days is in regards to the news media and the medals that Canada has won so far in the 2012 Olympic games. As evident it seems like Canada in terms of medals has mostly been winning bronze and the sentiment is that that it is a winter sports country here. What I did find funny in some ways was how there were all these news stories on how if people should treat bronze as the new gold.

While I guess I understand the psychology to it as I guess just like in say business you have to celebrate everything that you accomplish to develop positivity and momentum, it seems a little odd to change your way of thinking that your current accomplishment is the the highest, so to speak. Reminds me of the debate people have about schools with older kids where people are trained to think they can never fail at anything and when they enter the real world they aren’t ready to face the competition.

In my opinion, like in this case there should be no shame in getting a 3rd ranking in an event compared to the rest of the world. If anything too, in other scenarios it’s probably a good take away to learn what other people are doing to enable them to achieve various goals.