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The sales are continuous at Lowe’s. Probably other stores too, but I can say that I worked for Lowe’s for about 15 months and during that time we always had a sale going.
It’s a ruse to provide an artificial sense of urgency. One sale would end say 1/13 and on 1/14 we’d take down all the signage from that sale and put up the signage got the next sale.
That’s just how retail works.
Clothing stores too. Especially the "high end" ones that supposedly have their own factories just for them.
When I worked at Toys R Us, we had a kids clothes section and it was basically on a 3 week rotation. One week, brands 1 and 2 were on sale, next week brands 3 and 4, then finally brands 5 and 6 before starting over the next week. It wasn't 100% predictable, but generally everything would go on sale at least once a month. Sales on toys were less predictable just because there's so many more of them to cycle through.
We are all terrible at applying statistics, it is incongruent with the way our intuition works. It takes intentional consideration plus math and understanding to consider things statistically, much harder than the immediate intuitive answers our brains give us. The worst part is sometimes those intuitive answers are dead on, sometimes they totally miss the mark, and we have no way of knowing which is which without doing the hard work to evaluate the situation statistically.
The boom Thinking Fast and Slow covers this in great detail and provides some guidance on how to manage it.
I'm constantly amazed at how many people don't understand the concepts of basic finance and how compound interest works.
Years ago, I brought my laptop with me to buy a car so I could plug all the numbers into a quick amortization schedule. The sales person offered me a choice of $1,500 cash back or 1.9% financing instead of the typical rate a few percentage points higher.
I plugged the numbers into my spreadsheet and saw taking the cash back would cost me a couple grand more than the lower finance rate. When I told him I wanted the finance rate instead of the cash back, he mentioned that I was the only person he'd seen not take the cash back.
Maybe he was pulling my chain, but in my experience, the average person doesn't know what compound interest is, let alone what an amortization schedule is.
Not really completely on topic, but there's an app called Kinnu. It's free, and gamifies learning- like Duolingo but for a really wide variety of topics. So far I've done the pathways on learning, ikigai (Japanese concept of reason for living/being), logic and cognitive biases. They have pathways on other things too, like history, various sciences, philosophies, even personal finance (probably the next one I do).
It's a great way to kill 2-5 minutes a day and Ive learned a ton.
I’m a developmental psychologist, and the biggest thing is people just not knowing what “psychologist” means.
The tl;dr here is:
Most psychologists aren’t therapists. Most therapists aren’t psychologists. If you’re looking for quality mental health care, don’t revere the “doctor.”
A “psychologist” refers to someone with a PhD in psychology (or someone who does psychological research within an interdisciplinary field, like education or human development). Critically, a psychologist is a researcher (and often an educator at the college+ level). Psychology is a massive field, and the most common subfields are cognitive, developmental, social, clinical, and neurobio.
A “clinical psychologist” is a research psychologist is the particular subfield of clinical psychology. Along with research, clinical psychologists usually learn clinical psychotherapy practices and then may (or may not) choose to incorporate offering therapy into their career. A similar path is the “PsyD” (doctor of psychology) which also falls under the “psychologist” heading. Like a clinical psych PhD, a PsyD has had advanced training in research and practice, but the balance of the degree leans much more toward practice. People who opt for a PsyD rather than PhD usually plan to pursue a fully clinical career, but are qualified to do research as well.
A “therapist” is someone who is trained and licensed to provide clinical psychotherapy. Most therapists in the US have a master’s degree in social work (or a few others, like counseling psychology), specialized clinical training in one or more areas or treatments, and additional state licensure requirements. Clinical and counseling psychologists (with PhDs) can act as therapists if they get and maintain licenses, but this is a small fraction of therapists. PsyDs make up another chunk, but the majority do not have a terminal PhD/PsyD.
As a psychologist, I don’t say this because I think my PhD makes me better than someone with an MSW — the reverse! I hear people get advice to not see a therapist if they are “just” a social worker without a PhD. Meanwhile people come up to my dumbass self and think I am qualified to act as a therapist or like I know anything about clinical or abnormal psychology. Like, wanna know how 2-year-olds and 12-year-olds use nonverbal signals like shrugs to facilitate conversational interaction differently from each other and from adults? No? Then I am not the person you’re looking for. Go talk to that extremely knowledgeable and well-trained person with an MA.
…Meanwhile a “psychiatrist” is a whole other thing. They have an MD and can prescribe medication. Very rarely they may also offer psychotherapy, but that’s hard to make happen in the US a healthcare system.