Nostalgia In The Economy

From action figures to cereal boxes, people spend a lot of money on things that remind them of their childhood. The fact that a lot of these items are extremely rare doesn’t hurt their retail value, as it adds to their “dreamy”, “unobtainable” vision.
Disney makes a lot of money counting on the nostalgia people have for certain franchises. The second Incredibles movie had a lot of people bringing their kids or younger relatives to the theaters to watch it since they watched the first movie when they were kids. People will willingly watch the same premise executed slightly differently over and over again if it means that they get a nostalgia factor out of it.

Many people thought that the E.T. game was the leading cause for Atari's demise. It was widely hated by most people that played it, but now copies of the game are being sold for over a thousand dollars. The power of nostalgia and rarity in an item is illogical, but it pushes many people to buy very expensive things that others would see as worthless. I wonder why nostalgia and rarity is such a strong motivator to spend enormous amounts of money for some people?
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Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 30, 2019 at 6:19 PM

    This was a super interesting post! I never realized that companies such as Disney were actually just feeding off of consumers nostalgia. I always saw it more as a means to make easy money and a bit of a lack of creativity. Another example I can think of is Disney's reboot of basically all the animated Disney movies. While some of these films offer slight variation, as seen in the Lion King trailer that was allegedly "live action", the movie was basically a cleaner cut version of the movie with slightly more realistic lions that were indeed CG and not real lions.

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  2. AnonymousApril 1, 2019 at 8:30 AM

    This is a pretty cool pattern, in my opinion, that when we attach very strong emotions to something we seek similar things and our demand becomes very elastic because we are willing to pay for it pretty much no matter what it costs. This is great for companies, but they tend not to abuse that. I have seen very few examples of corporations charging more for the base version of something marketed off of nostalgia, but what we will see is special editions that take advantage of peoples passion for something they used to love.

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