You ever get the feeling where you really want to buy something?
It’s so strong this time of year.
It doesn’t even matter what – there’s just this rush of getting something new and shiny.
Well, finally figured out a way to use the Kindle and the iPhone’s ‘super easy to buy things’ capability in a good way.
Buy $2 Kindle indie titles and $1 iPhone Apps instead of expensive stuff
Rather than $100 shoes or $200 gadgets that you’ll use once a month go crazy on a shopping spree in the Kindle Store and the App Store.
We should still buy the good, big-ticket items we need. However, when we have that spending feeling and know it’s more about spending than filling a need, we should substitute this -
Kindle Store
- 2 free public domain titles.
- 3 $2 indie titles.
iPhone App Store
- A couple 99 cent iPhone games.
- 4-5 free iPhone Apps.
We just got 11 new things – and spent just $8.
Watch out for the expensive stuff – There are lots of $9.99 kindle books and $5 and $10 iPhone Apps so watch out for them.
Are we all being programmed to spend recklessly?
Everywhere there are more and more efforts to get us to spend without really thinking about it -
- Data and Voice overage charges.
- Direct Debit recurring payments.
- Paypal for quick purchases.
- 1 click purchases.
- Apple iPhone Store purchases that don’t even register until you get the receipt later in the day.
At what point is it going to become too easy to spend money – perhaps it already is.
You know what would be a good feature – something that popped up BEFORE any 1 or 2 click purchase. It could just be a big banner that said -
Are you sure you NEED this?
Are you sure you are going to use this?
You’ve already spent $500 on books this year.
Perhaps even a feature that gave you statistics – you have bought 23 books and read 11 books this year.
A rational spending feature.
The irony is that the program best suited to this i.e. Mint.com, just got acquired by Quicken and that reduces the chances that they’ll implement it.
Mint keeps emailing me trying to get me to switch banks to save mere cents on bank fees – Why not help me make smarter buying decisions and save me a ton of money?
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | Kindle Bookstore, kindle store
“Perhaps even a feature that gave you statistics – you have bought 23 books and read 11 books this year.”
How would this program determine the number of books read? People have been asking for some sort of tag to mark this, but if the user cannot figure out how many books he has read then how is an outside program going to do that?
From how far in the book the user went through.