Each year, retailers manipulate us with emails, ads and discounts – it’s time to switch them off
It’s here. The time of year when every single marketing email you’ve signed up for over the course of the last few years – to get that tempting introductory discount perhaps – comes back to haunt you. A terrifying flurry of discounts, all for a limited time only, often with an additional dose of emotional blackmail about how buying this product will make you a better person, friend, parent, sibling.
Each year, the Black Friday emails come thicker, faster and earlier, with a vigour rivalled only by the Hogwarts owls, and the spectre of last year’s semi-cancelled Christmas has rendered most of us more vulnerable to manipulative marketing than ever.
Clare Seal is the author of My Frugal Year