Edit: In a way it reminds me of mining cryptocurrency. It's a system designed to reward people who can prove that they're wasting some other resource.
A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that this particular human has available. Letting them choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than removing that choice. There may be "better" things they could do with it according to you, but ultimately it should be their choice.
The irony is particulary deep here because hunting down a sale is surely no less wasteful to society than actually playing Factorio which is a pointless videogame famous for being an addictive time-sink. If the goal was to maximize societal benefit, we'd remove Factorio from the market entirely.
> If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.
I think you're jumping to a conclusion that these people are particularly poor. But my only claim is that people have different relative distributions of money versus time, and that is probably true at all wealth levels. There are both idle rich and workaholics. There are poor folks working three jobs and raising three kids and others that are couch potatoes.
Sales are a way to let consumers at any economic level reflect their relative priority between time and cash.
Unless you consider the sale price as the base price, in which case you're forcing people to spend time hunting a sale to not get gouged, and it's strictly worse than having a fixed lower price.
You can take that set of transactions and apply any number of narratives:
* The sale price is the base price and that others are gouging is a narrative that you can apply to the set of transactions.
* The full price is the real price and sales are a delightful bonus that you give to people who show that they care more by hunting down the sale.
* The full price is the real price and sales are a charity you give to those less able to afford that price.
* The sale is the real price and the full price is a way of milking the rich who are too foolish or lazy to get a good deal.
Etc.
But the transactions themselves don't provide enough data to determine which of these narratives, if any, is closest to the truth.
I don't know of a good way to actually make that happen, and I'm not suggesting we should ban sales or anything like that, just that the current system wastes people's time and it would be better if it didn't.
I suppose you're one of those people who sees video games as, well, I'll use your own words:
> pointless...addictive time-sink
The same could be said of novels, movies, sporting events, TV shows, and plays.
Removing art and entertainment from society because it's not "socially beneficial" is a terrible policy.
The end of society should be to improve human life. Producing things that are economically useful to produce more things is a means to that end. It's a very effective means. But if you confuse it with an end, you get a terrible repressive society where no one's allowed to do anything for the joy of it.
People voluntarily use their money to buy things they enjoy. Money is basically a credit the economy gives to people for helping the economy produce stuff, that then allows them to consume some of the stuff that the economy produces.
If you disallow people from spending their money on things that aren't "socially beneficial," the whole economic system implodes because (a) there's no incentive for people to produce stuff because they're not allowed to get consumption as a reward, and (b) there's no consumption to drive the incentive to produce stuff.