It's 11:40pm and I am sitting here with seven browser tabs open, four of them Amazon, one of them my own bank app, because apparently the answer to "do I need this" stopped being a question I ask myself somewhere around 9pm. Cyber Monday. It got me again.
I want to be the guy who doesn't fall for it. Every year I tell myself the discounts are fake, that the "was $89.99, now $34.99" thing is just retail theater, that half these prices were higher two weeks ago specifically so they could be slashed today. And every year I am mostly right about that and buy stuff anyway. This year the stuff was: a Brother P-touch label maker, $19.99 down from something like $34, and a 2TB external SSD that I did not need but which was $30 cheaper than it was on Black Friday, which doesn't even make sense to me but here we are.
The label maker thing deserves its own sentence because it's a little embarrassing. I have a drawer (everyone has this drawer) full of cables that could be a Lightning cable, could be a random USB-A to micro-USB thing from a keyboard I sold two Christmases ago, could be a charger for a headlamp I own. I have been meaning to label these for maybe three years. Tonight, at 11pm, discount pricing finally broke me. I will report back on whether I actually use it or whether it joins the drawer of things bought to organize other things, which is its own drawer, which is arguably worse.
The bigger tech story of the last couple weeks obviously wasn't shopping, it was the absolute circus over at OpenAI — Altman out, Altman back, a new board, several hundred employees apparently ready to walk out the door behind him. I'm not going to try to explain the whole thing here because by the time anyone reads this it'll be old news and also I think every tech outlet on earth already did the blow-by-blow to death. What I'll say instead is that watching it unfold in real time on Twitter (I still call it that, sue me) was genuinely one of the stranger weekends I've had following this industry, and I've been doing this blog since 2011. Companies do dumb PR spin all the time. It's rarer that you get to watch a board seemingly detonate its own reason for existing in under 72 hours, live, with no clear script. Anyway. Not the point of tonight's post, just noting it happened and that I was as glued to my phone as everyone else.
Back to the actual point, which is that Cyber Monday as a concept has gotten a little exhausting. It used to feel like an event — Black Friday was the doorbuster chaos, Cyber Monday was the calmer online cousin where you'd grab the one thing you missed. Now the sales just start the Monday before Thanksgiving and don't really stop until mid-December, and by the time the "actual" Cyber Monday rolls around everything's already been discounted, undiscounted, and discounted again in a way that makes the whole concept of a sale kind of meaningless. My email inbox currently has 43 unread promotional emails, which I know because I just checked, and at least six of them are from stores I have never bought anything from and do not remember signing up for.
I did not buy a new laptop even though I looked at three of them for a combined ninety minutes, because my four-year-old ThinkPad is still fine and I refuse to be the guy who upgrades a working machine because a banner told him to. That's my one piece of actual restraint tonight and I'm choosing to feel good about it instead of thinking too hard about the label maker sitting in a shipping confirmation email fifteen minutes old.
Going to bed. The SSD ships Wednesday.