high-pressure sellers because it carries the purest form of decision
deadline: right now. Customers are often told that unless they make an
immediate decision to buy, they will have to purchase the item at a
higher price or they will be unable to purchase it at all. A prospective
health-club member or automobile buyer might learn that the deal
offered by the salesperson is good only for that one time; should the
customer leave the premises, the deal is off. One large child-portrait
photography company urges parents to buy as many poses and copies
as they can afford because “stocking limitations force us to burn the
unsold pictures of your children within twenty-four hours.” A door-to-
door magazine solicitor might say that salespeople are in the customer’s
area for just a day; after that, they—and the customer’s chance to buy
their magazine package—will be long gone. A home vacuum-cleaner
operation I infiltrated instructed its sales trainees to claim, “I have so
many other people to see that I have the time to visit a family only once.
It’s company policy that even if you decide later that you want this
machine, I can’t come back and sell it to you.” This, of course, is non-
sense; the company and its representatives are in the business of making
sales, and any customer who called for another visit would be accom-
modated gladly. As the company sales manager impressed on his
trainees, the true purpose of the can’t-come-back claim has nothing to
do with reducing overburdened sales schedules. It is to “keep the pro-
spects from taking the time to think the deal over by scaring them into
believing they can’t have it later, which makes them want it now.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTANCE
The evidence, then, is clear. Compliance practitioners’ reliance on
scarcity as a weapon of influence is frequent, wide-ranging, systematic,
and diverse. Whenever such is the case with a weapon of influence, we
can feel assured that the principle involved has notable power in direct-
ing human action. In the instance of the scarcity principle, that power
comes from two major sources. The first is familiar. Like the other
weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for
shortcuts. The weakness is, as before, an enlightened one. In this case,
because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically
better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s
availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality. Thus,
one reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is that, by following
it, we are usually and efficiently right.^3
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 183