It’s with futile hope that, this time each year, I break out the previous year’s Christmas lights. Emphasis on “break.”
Every year on New Year’s Day, I put the lights away with great care, wrapping each strand gently around a spool, testing each before placing it in the bin. Yet, when I bring them out a year later, half of them (or just a third if I’m lucky) will, for no good reason, fail to light.
I’m particularly amused by the cheap lights that come with a tiny fuse in a tiny plastic baggie taped to the plug. Never once, in years of fussing with failed Christmas lights, have I brought a dead strand back to life by switching out the fuse. I have come to suspect they aren’t really fuses at all, just counterfeit duds put there to make us think that the lights would be fixable if we only knew what we were doing.
But if I knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t have bought the hinky lights in the first place.
The fault, of course, is my own. No amount of handling with care is going to change the fact that I bought junk light strands in the first place. I make the mistake, year after year, of buying Christmas lights down the street at the big drugstore. The day after Halloween, they clear out the last few bags of forlorn candy from the seasonal aisle and start stacking the shelves with ornaments, tinsel, animatronic Santas, scrawny plastic trees to be assembled at home, candy canes of various sizes, and lights — more lights than any of the other folderol on the shelves.
And what selection! There are blinkers and bubblers, long strands and short, ascetic white lights and bulbs in kaleidoscopic colors. But what there aren’t, in the midst of the decorative cornucopia, are lights likely to last more than a Christmas or two.
What at first seems to speak of convenient abundance — shelf after shelf stuffed with lights — is actually a clue to the quality of the product. There are so many lights for sale at the drugstore because those of us who buy our Christmas lights at the drugstore have to buy a few strands every year.
Why haven’t I gotten wise? It isn’t as though there aren’t high-quality lights on the market. Let’s say they cost twice as much as the drugstore staples but last maybe seven or eight years rather than just one or two. In such a case, economists would expect us to make a rational, self-interested choice and pick the quality product. And yet, we don’t. When it comes to things such as Christmas lights, we can be counted on to go cheap. We’re so predictable that, outside of specialty stores, quality alternatives aren’t even offered.
I imagine that the behavioral economics crowd — who earn their pay pointing to people’s endemic irrationality and asking classical economic theorists what gives — have a theory that explains my bad decision-making regarding lights. Perhaps I am a variety of what they would call a “satisficer.” With little time and limited decision-making bandwidth, the satisficer only devotes enough brainpower to arrive at a satisfactory choice rather than an optimal one. Behavioral economists like catchy names for various cognitive blunders, mistakes, and common shortcuts. I think there’s a Ph.D. thesis waiting to be written about those of us who persist in buying drugstore Christmas lights. Call us, “Santasficers.”
But this year, I’m going to try to do better. I will check all the light strands early and go online in search of durable replacements for any that don’t work.
Sure, I will.
Before I know it, the weekend will be here, and we’ll be off to buy a tree. We’ll get the tree in a stand in the living room, and only then will I start checking the lights. And before the ornaments go on the tree, I’ll be making a quick trip down to the drugstore.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
