Why Did I Buy All That – 16 Million Dollar Pikachu
Logan Paul's $16.5mn Pokemon card is the hook for a clear lesson in scarcity and value. With 10.2bn cards printed in a year, Taylor asks why one is worth millions, and lands on authentication and condition: grading services like PSA make scarcity credible in a market full of forgeries, much as provenance turned a £45 painting into a half-billion-dollar Leonardo. She also covers booster packs as a blind gamble and the 'stock market for Pokemon' where speculators trade on futur
Why Did I Buy All That – The sweet smell of successful advertising
Why are perfume adverts so strange? Because they are selling a smell a screen cannot transmit, so they sell a feeling instead. Taylor uses a 'multi-sensory' Magnum billboard at King's Cross (pumping out chocolate scent and biting sounds, to mixed reviews and complaints about competing tunnel smells) to make a point about advertising: even a half-mocked campaign succeeds if it gets thousands of people thinking about the brand. Good for advertising as non-price competition, bra
Why Did I Buy All That – Yes, we want fries with that
Self-service technology, read through behavioural economics. Taylor opens with the University of Connecticut honesty-box study (even a sculpted head watching us boosts payment), then applies 'observed people are nicer people' to self-checkouts, where anonymity turns ordinary shoppers into Emmeline Taylor's 'SWIPERS'. The flip side is upselling: 61 per cent of customers spend more ordering via a McDonald's kiosk, because no human means no judgement. Amazon's retreat from till-