Nutella 'riots' spread across French supermarkets
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/30/581843472...
France has strict rules about when a product can be sold for below cost.
One supermarket chain in France gives a substantial discount on a product that kids love, some people in a few of these stores go nuts, this is then filmed and uploaded to the internet.
What are we to make it of? Depends. My guess is that lot of these people are presumably low-income and aren't always able to buy Nutella for their kids. Or they are, but it's a significant part of their weekly grocery bill. So I suppose it was kind of a big deal in that regard, to be able to buy their kids the real deal instead of generic supermarket brands. (Pretty much the same thing, but try to explain that to little kids). In which case it's all a bit tragic, really. Or maybe that's not it at all and the story is about the lengths to which deal-hunters will go for a few euros. But the news doesn't go into all of this — the report was that people went crazy and fought each other for cheap Nutella across French supermarkets.
In any case, it's odd for such an isolated, specific incident to receive international coverage. This isn't even that interesting to people living in France unless you want to try to understand understand the sociology/economics of it.
shrugs
This is interesting for left politicians who want to intrumentalize that. For smartasses who like to look down on others because they are soo free of consumerism (they are not). But to be interesting for sociologists, it'd require a more in depth study implying those concerned. Or maybe... A study of the media coverage and reception of the "phenomenon", which would imo be way more interesting when it comes to analysing today's society than yet another show of black-friday-like craze.
People love nutella so much, it's a real shame it has such a terrible impact on the planet.
I think this tells us so much about the financial literacy of today's society. And also quite something about the human psychology.
- It seems to me that people buy stuff they don't really need just because it's discounted
- When the relative discount is large but the absolute discount tiny, people tend to overestimate the value they're getting
- Lower income folks tend to spend more on materialist things that they don't really need, but when it comes to essential items like food, they try to save money
I just can't believe that people go this crazy over a couple of euros in savings. Maybe someone with a psychology background can help me out? :-)
As for your question, it's mostly marketing plays with knowed biases and affects. And low-income people are all the more pressured to buy stuff on discount because they feel like they can only get it now. When you earn 5k a month, you don't really care about a discount, you can buy that Nutella whenever you want.
As for their saving on important stuff while spending on consumerist stuff, they just follow the norms we push down their throats. Nobody knows you eat pasta and shower with cold water. Everybody can see your 5 years old smartphone and dirty cloths.
In Italy, however, you can buy many other locally-made brands of hazelnut spread which still contain 50% or more hazelnut. Much tastier, probably healthier, and in Italy they're not all that much more expensive than Nutella!