Most people hear promotion trap and think of the usual tricks: no returns after sale, no returns once opened, and similar gray-area schemes. That is not what I mean here. Those are opportunistic practices that tend to show up in periods when regulation is weak. What I want to talk about is something more open and more ordinary: a kind of promotion that exploits the limits of consumer thinking. It does not restrain your behavior. It only targets your mind. That is why it is a trap that lives in the open.

Promotions do not necessarily mean lower prices

When people mention promotions, they usually think of price cuts first. In everyday speech, promotion and price reduction have almost become the same thing. But merchants are often much smarter than buyers. A promotion can come with a lower price, a flat price, or even a higher price.

Discount promotions are the most familiar, so there is not much to say. Most people who end up buying impulsively are simply stepping into a discount trap.

Flat-price promotions are more interesting, and I can explain them with my own experience.

Six years ago, I bought a 24-inch AOC monitor. At the time, money was tight and I did not understand monitor specifications very well, so I picked a best-selling model on JD that looked good and was cheap. The reason I chose it was simple: it seemed like a good deal. For six years it stayed reliable. Apart from a few seconds of corner ripple when it powered on, caused by magnetic interference from a desktop speaker, it did not give me much trouble.

Then this year I read a post by a friend, Lao Mai, who had bought a DELL 4K monitor and described the experience as “astonishing.” That made me wonder what kind of difference could justify such a word. After reading some introductions and a few Zhihu articles, I learned that monitors differ in bit depth, color gamut, color accuracy, pixel density, and even in how saturation is tuned. On top of that there are HDR, response time, split-screen features, interfaces, and all the other extras that make the thing even more tempting.

Looking back at my so-called cost-effective AOC monitor, it suddenly seemed awkward. It had that slight magnetic distortion at startup, the image looked gray and dull, text was not sharp, and what bothered me most was probably the low-end 6-bit + FRC panel. Photos looked off in color, and after staring at it for too long I even started wondering if it would speed up my presbyopia.

So I decided to replace it.

I had my eye on a 28-inch Samsung 4K monitor. JD would run promotions from time to time, but the price stayed around 1,999 yuan. Because a new monitor was an important but not urgent need, and because I am the kind of buyer who is very sensitive to price, I was willing to wait.

During JD’s 618 sale, the monitor was still priced at around 1,999 yuan. I held back with considerable self-control and did not buy it immediately. I waited until Double 11, and the price was still around 1,999 yuan. At that point I bought it without hesitation.

Why did I not buy at 1,999 during ordinary days, not buy at 1,999 during 618, but buy at 1,999 during Double 11? That is exactly Samsung’s flat-price promotion strategy: keep the price firm enough to break the consumer’s expectation of a discount, and in doing so test how much real desire is behind the purchase.

If you pay attention, you will notice that most big-sale prices are not very different from the prices in smaller, everyday promotions. In many cases, they are basically flat-price sales. Yet during major sale periods, merchants sell far more than usual.

Price increases can also be used as promotions, though many people do not notice it. The classic case is real estate: the more prices rise, the more supply is held back, and the better it seems to sell. The same logic can be seen in jade, calligraphy and painting, various luxury goods, and limited-edition flagship phones that are sold out in a flash.

Several common types of promotion

Promotions come in many forms, but the logic behind them is actually limited. No matter how they change, they are usually one of the following types, or a combination of them.

1. Getting more than the money’s worth

Price cuts are the classic version of this. In economic terms, the value is greater than the price, or the consumer feels they have gained consumer surplus. Put simply, buyers think they have gotten one over on the seller.

2. Lowering the barrier to purchase

Installment payment is the most common way to lower the barrier. If the full price is too high, the merchant lets the consumer pay a deposit first, or even no deposit at all, and then pay in installments.

The point is not just to make unaffordable consumption possible. It also turns delayed consumption into immediate consumption.

3. Creating urgency

Flash sales are the typical example here. The purpose is to create urgency through scarcity. Once people feel something might disappear, they stop calmly weighing price, performance, or whether they actually need it. In that moment, their ability to choose is weakened.

4. Bundling

Offers like “Choose any ten books for 80 yuan” or “Choose any three consumer items for 99 yuan” are classic bundling promotions. Bundling allows merchants to move slow-selling goods along with better-selling ones.

Consumers think the unit price is low once everything is added up, but many bundled items are products that are hard to sell in normal times, or items whose prices are badly inflated. For the merchant, they may be difficult to cash out and still take up storage space, so as long as they are sold, the loss is reduced.

That is also why so many people stock up on things they later call “dead weight” during major sales. They do not really need them, but throwing them away feels wasteful.

5. Forced pairing

Forced pairing means attaching an unsold item to a popular one. If you want the hot item, you must also buy the slow mover. Buying a house and being required to buy a parking space, buying a car and being required to buy insurance, or buying a phone and being required to buy a power bank are all familiar examples.

The logic is simple: when the popular item is scarce, the seller has the upper hand. That advantage is used to take away the consumer’s freedom to choose the less attractive item.

6. Extending the purchase chain

This is common in food and dining. A place advertises “Spend 200, get 200 back,” and the customer thinks it is free money. In reality, what they get are 200 yuan in vouchers, often split into four separate redemptions, with minimum spending rules and exclusions on drinks.

What looks like an immediate reward is really a longer chain of spending.

7. Buying the box and getting the pearl

This type of promotion uses a high-value item that everyone already knows the price of as the bait, in order to make people pay an obviously high price for something whose value is hard to judge.

A simple example: outside many schools, you can find cards like superhero cards being sold. A pack contains six cards and costs 10 yuan. If you collect a full set, you can exchange it for a backpack. The backpack may be worth 100 or 200 yuan, but the cards may cost less than 1 yuan to produce. Within each set, there are always a few cards that are very unlikely to appear, so children buy large numbers of duplicate cards and then throw them away.

When I was in middle school, there was a similar kind of promotion. It was a bagged puffed snack that cost around 3 yuan. There was not much actual food inside; most of it was air. But there were various cards in the package, and if you collected them all, you could exchange them for prizes, including a bicycle. I remember many students bought the snack just to give the food away to others, keeping only the cards. Later people even went to the trash heap and stomped on the plastic wrappers to collect the cards, because nobody wanted to eat the snack anymore. By then, the food itself had almost no value left.

Adults are not immune either. Online promotions like “buy this and get the latest iPhone” or “buy this and enter a draw for the latest iPhone” are often the same thing.

The logic underneath promotions

The forms are varied, but the internal logic is actually simple. There are only two basic goals: make people buy things they do not urgently need, and speed up their decision-making.

These sound like the same thing, but they are not. A consumer’s lack of urgency is tied to limited money. A consumer’s decision process is tied to limited decision time. Of course, both money and time are limited, or scarce. That is what economics is really about.

If a consumer had unlimited money and unlimited time, economics would have little to study. Economics studies human economic behavior, and only gods have no shortage of anything. In reality, even for the richest person, time is scarce.

Most consumers are short on money, or at least on one side more than the other. Some are short on both money and time, but people who lack both are usually still more short on money, because if both are scarce, then the value of time is not usually very high.

Most of the promotion types above target people who lack money. Some target people who lack decision time. Some try to do both.

When money is scarce, consumers can only satisfy a small part of their needs, so they have to make choices. At the same time, one yuan means more to a poor person than to a rich one, which makes the poor person’s decision chain longer.

Rich people have more room financially, so they have a higher tolerance for mistakes when buying. That leads to a shorter decision chain, which fits the fact that they are usually more short on time.

The trap of promotion is that it lowers consumer utility. People buy things impulsively that are not what they need most, and the combination they end up with is not the optimal one. In more extreme cases, it pushes poor people into debt-driven consumption, which reduces their total utility even further because fees, interest, and other costs eat into their spending power.

For richer people, the money lost to impulse buying may not matter much, but the time wasted dealing with unwanted goods still damages their total utility.

There are also other harms. A poor person may impulsively buy a large item, regret it immediately, and then spend the next two or three days in a bad mood. Because they are not focused at work, they may get criticized by their boss and lose part of a bonus. Because their life is out of rhythm, they may drive distracted and cause a rear-end collision, which creates even more loss.

Or a college student may borrow money for a promotion-driven purchase and later be unable to repay it, eventually turning to usurious loans.

Why promotions distort decision-making

In theory, every consumer should be a rational economic agent and naturally seek to maximize utility. So why do people so often make bad choices when promotions are involved?

Research in behavioral economics and psychology offers an explanation: decision-making is affected by both resource scarcity and limited mental capacity. Interfere with either one, and the result changes.

Resource scarcity is easy to understand. If we are short on money, then money is a scarce resource, and that will influence what we buy. A car priced at 10,000 yuan might be bought without hesitation. At 100,000 yuan, it may be rejected.

The same 10,000-yuan car may take a rich person only a few minutes to decide on, while a poor person may think for days. Promotions work in the opposite direction. If a 10,000-yuan car is discounted by 500 yuan, it may not change a rich person’s decision much, but it may immediately sway a poor person.

That is why poor consumers are more sensitive to price promotions. They are more easily affected by discounts.

Rich consumers behave differently. Take a microwave oven: a poor person may spend a great deal of time studying its functions, even tracking down the supplier of the glass door. A rich person may buy it after one push notification or one bundled offer.

The whole-home kitchen package is a good example. Wealthy buyers do not have time to study every appliance in the kitchen, so they buy the integrated package. But functionally, such packages are often not as practical as buying the appliances separately, even though they cost more.

Thinking about mental capacity is harder because it is abstract, but it becomes easier if you compare the consumer’s mind to a computer.

Everyone’s processing speed is different because everyone has had different experiences in study, work, and life. Still, the overall difference is not enormous. The bigger issue is that the brain has to think about many different things at once.

At work, a person may have to consider customer demands, the boss’s attitude, cooperation from colleagues, and whether their own plan is competitive. Outside of work, they still have to worry about a daughter’s kindergarten admission, a father’s health, and credit card bills that are past due.

If there is also a colleague who behaves like a parrot and interrupts every five minutes, the thinking space left for actual work becomes even smaller.

The same logic applies to consumption decisions. A flood of promotional information takes up mental space. Similar product details get mixed together in memory, and complicated discount combinations eventually make the brain freeze. In the end, the consumer feels that everything looks fine and buys the item they happened to see right before the freeze.

In short, a large volume of promotional information occupies mental capacity and weakens decision-making, which leads to unwise choices.

Why are poorer consumers more easily affected by promotions? Part of the reason is that price promotions matter more to them. Another reason is that they are also more likely to pay attention to promotional information in the first place, which further occupies their mental capacity.

The poorer someone is, the more they like looking at promotions. The more they look, the more easily their utility is damaged. Once utility is damaged, they become even poorer, and then they become even more drawn to promotions. That is where the vicious cycle begins.

Promotion traps are everywhere

When people hear the word promotion, they instinctively think of goods. That is a narrow view. Anything scarce can be promoted.

Parents worry about their children’s intelligence, so tutoring centers have their own promotions.

Adults who are older and still single feel a shortage of partners, so dating websites promote themselves.

Homebound men feel a shortage of social contact, so friend-making platforms promote themselves.

Elderly people living alone feel a shortage of care, so scammers promote themselves.

In each case, the result is often the opposite of what people expected. Those who join dating sites often feel even less confident about marriage. Those who use friend-making sites often end up with fewer friends. Seniors who are cheated usually want care even more afterward.

As for whether children become smarter after tutoring, I personally do not think so. Too much training can crowd out the time children need to think. Memory begins to squeeze out thought. The result may be a kind of “encyclopedia that cannot think.” For that reason, I support the policy logic behind banning tutoring institutions.

A final thought

Promotions use scarce resources to lure consumers into non-optimal decisions, lowering their utility. They also flood people with information and occupy mental capacity, pushing them further toward bad choices.

And yet this kind of trap is exposed to the light of day. It is not hidden in the shadows. It is legal, it is ordinary, and it waits for consumers to walk into it on their own.

The only way to avoid being caught is to fully understand that the trap exists and refuse to accept the promotion in the first place. But that itself is a contradiction, because even when a person is rational and has enough mental space, they can still be affected by outside events. A quarrel with a girlfriend, or a scolding from the boss, can suddenly consume that mental space. Once that happens, people make mistakes more easily.

A rational man who has spent two hours choosing in a mall can be instantly pushed into impulse buying by a single dismissive glance from a salesperson, especially if that glance is directed toward a bald rich man who had just spent money without hesitation. In that moment, the rational man may buy the most expensive item on the spot.

Scarcity is everywhere: money, time, emotion, knowledge, health. There is always something we lack, and often something we lack badly. Learning how to deal with promotions, how not to let them occupy too much of our mental space, and how to make the best choice in the end, is a long-term question in consumer life.

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This is another post that drifts away from what it set out to say. I started out wanting to write a long piece on economics and behavioral science, but halfway through it turned into a piece of fluff. Why do I so often give up midway? The excuse I usually use is that it is late, I am sleepy, and I should go to bed.

But I know the real reason is not simply fatigue or a shortage of energy. It is mostly a shortage of knowledge. And if knowledge is scarce, then avoiding a fluffy article means looking things up. But that takes time, which makes energy scarcer still.

Writing a blog post is only a hobby, so I cannot let it occupy all of my mental space. Rationally speaking, I should finish what I want to say in as little time as possible. That is why the result can only be a fluffy post.

Writing fluff is also a non-optimal choice. Maybe the rational thing would be to spend the time digging through sources and write something genuinely worth reading. But if I already know that diligent fluff-writing is a trap I am stepping into on purpose, why do I still choose it?

Maybe that is the fate of the poor. Here I mean poor in knowledge, though money is not exactly absent either.