A handy guide for consumers who want to become smarter, happier buyers.
A trained psychologist and successful businessman offers advice for consumers to help prevent buyer’s remorse and avoid sales traps.
In this debut guide for buyers, Coopersmith (Psychiatry/Temple Univ.) culls nearly four decades of experience studying buying and selling behaviors. He claims 25 percent of buyers are dissatisfied with their large-purchase transactions and concludes that uneven business cycles cause aggressive, manipulative sales practices. However, he writes, consumers can regain control of the buying process with proper training. He bases his advice on human behavior studies, his review of sales manuals, and interviews with sales professionals and consumer advocates. In Chapter 1, Coopersmith says buyers inherently have advantages in the buying process because they can know the costs, alternatives, research, decision power and scheduling—or CARDS, as he calls it. However, skilled salesmen often turn such advantages into disadvantages, thus forcing irrational consumer behavior. For example, slick salesmen will hide “the high cost of a luxury car [with] the dazzling promise of vehicle ownership for only a few hundred dollars a month” or bombard “the buyer with freebies that will make any price seem readily affordable.” Chapters 2 and 3 cover manipulative gambits salesmen use to exploit consumer vulnerabilities, such as a buyer’s need for friendship, status and victory. Chapters 4 and 5 instruct the buyer on how to regain control by becoming a well-informed shopper and good negotiator with a solid buying persona who remains relaxed and in control, fully aware of the games salespeople play. In Chapters 6 and 7, Coopersmith reviews special considerations for buyers of real estate and investments, warning against tactics used in these industries and false promises of value that lead to market bubbles. In all, Coopersmith brings considerable insight for buyers in his brief guide, writing persuasively about the need to become more educated about the buying process. Although the text is occasionally clinical in tone, reflecting a psychologist’s background, it is a well-organized, quick read that should prove helpful for those looking for better buys.
A handy guide for consumers who want to become smarter, happier buyers.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500710163
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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