Preparing for the great hunt

For around 200 years, the people of Effuto, a region in Ghana have one big blow out on the first day of May. 

In the Aboakyer Festival, two teams of hunters present themselves to the Royal Family at dawn. There they perform rituals to “curse” the opposing team before heading out into the bush in opposite directions.

The goal is to be the first team to return back to the Royal Family with a deer that they have successfully hunted. The first team back is that year’s champion and is celebrated as such.  Failure to capture a deer by either side is considered a bad omen for the coming year.  

They usually catch a deer though and after the ritual of the hunt is over they get down to what all people the world over do during a celebration — they eat, drink and dance to the wee hours of the next morning.    

Humans are hardwired to hunt. It’s in our DNA from the earliest days, which is why the Aboakyer Festival is just one such celebration that takes place around the world to celebrate a successful hunt.

That said, these type of colourful celebrations are generally only found in the developing world these days. In the West the celebration of the hunt has largely become a thing of the past — we can just whip down to the supermarket to grab some meat. 

That doesn’t mean that our instincts for hunting our goan though. They’ve just changed. In the West we now put our hunting instincts all in on the consumption of consumer goods. We don’t hunt deer; we hunt 72’ Smart TVs at bargain basement prices.   

And we have a festival of sorts to celebrate our great bargain hunt — Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Prime Day. After a weird 2020 which saw Prime Day scaled back in much of the world and cancelled in others, it returns today (June 21) in 20 countries — Germany, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, The United Arab Emirates, Spain, United States, France, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Holland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Singapore and Turkey. 

This is Amazon’s most significant day of the year and it will be interesting to see what the numbers are in sales for 2021, as a lot of the world starts to emerge out of the pandemic and is looking to celebrate with some good ole’ bargain hunting.

The numbers of the last full Prime Day paint a picture of just how big. In 2019, was $10.4 billion was spent on Amazon, with an additional $3.5 billion in the seller’s Marketplace. Huge numbers and they represented a significant increase from 2018.

Should we expect that in 2021? No one is sure what consumer confidence will be coming out of what was a tough 18 months.    

Of note, though, is that a couple significant countries in terms of size (India) and buying power (Canada) are sitting out this prime day, citing concerns about over burdening their supply chain during what they say is an ongoing pandemic. 

And, those supply chain concerns aren’t completely unfounded. The current Chinese port delays are a timebomb looming over everything right now when it comes to the global economic recovery.  

However, I suspect many people looking to pull out their Credit Card today aren’t going to to concern themselves with how the stuff is going to get shipped to them. 

No, they’re going to get down to the business of bring back a deer so they can celebrate another successful hunt.