Shop. Sleep. Repeat.

Seems like the only thing everyone doing these days is shopping. With christmas now under a week away everyone has to make sure they haven't missed anyone, and make sure they have all of the necessary things to wraps gifts. Working at a Shoppers I keep seeing people buy a bunch of wrapping paper, bows, tags, and the biggest hit during the christmas season are the gift cards.

The amount of advertising that occurs during christmas is also incredible, and in my opinion, the way that it is done is very subtle. Playing christmas music I find is a unique way of advertising. Every store playing this music means that every time you walk into a place, you're reminded that you've got to get that gift for that random cousin you never see. With relation to consumer behaviour, overloading people with christmas music is a form of classical conditioning. This occurs when consumers learn associations between stimuli without complex processing. It's been found that consumers are essentially controlled by the music so they spend more:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9743137/Christmas-music-makes-us-spend-more.html.

Now this can related to how consumers learn and remember things. Playing christmas music to make us spend more can be seen as a classical conditioning practice, as we're not born knowing that christmas music means that it's christmas time, and therefore time to buy all the gifts. I find personally that I get frustrated by the music if it's played too early, because it's almost obvious that the business is trying to force me to get into the spirit of the holidays and buy a bunch of things 2 months early. By playing it early, it kind of relates to the repetition idea with regards to learning. If we hear christmas music 2 months of the year instead of just one, it kind of increases the amount we'll be wanting to shop because it gets us into the mood of christmas.

There is also a dark side to this type of thing, which I recently found out from a coworker. He does not celebrate christmas as his family practices a different religion, and he is trying to teach his kids why they don't get the gifts that they see advertised everywhere. He was telling me about how whenever he takes his kids out, especially when it's as early as November, and there is strictly christmas music playing everywhere, it can get overwhelming. Since his kids have lived in Canada their entire lives it gets hard because they have grown up learning that when December rolls around it's strictly christmas themed everything.


Overall, christmas time is a great time to be with your family, have fun with friends, but when it comes to the business practices in that time, there should be some sort of limit set so that people can enjoy their time more and reduce the conditioned feeling that the only thing reason christmas is here is to spend money and exchange gifts. This does link to the gift giving post I made previously, which again, could be seen as a conditioned action for consumers because it's not really in our nature to celebrate christmas by spending money and buying gifts. But I guess that's just the way the world works now.