The vast majority of people are perfectly okay with FOMO as a sales tactic. This includes self-respecting, loyal, repeat customers of quality brands. Conversely, very few people are spiteful enough to go through the trouble of switching to a competitor purely out of disdain for FOMO being used as a sales tactic.

A couple examples:

- The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers for online content. A tremendous number. Many of their sales pages feature countdown timers and phrases like "Time is running out."

- Pretty much any clothing brand. For example, rare Nike shoe drops. People are willing to spend hundreds of dollars, wake up at ridiculous hours, and stand in line for hours, for FOMO-driven clothing sales. And far from driving people away from the brand, doing this increases people's loyalty to the brand, because FOMO works on social proof.

I very much identify with the self respecting type your parent describes and try my best to 'punish' sellers who try silly FOMO tactics, by demoting them into oblivion in my books. However, I am still prone to some FOMO with proven, trusted brands.

Anecdote: Several years ago I happened to try out a certain brand of shoes and loved the quality and style and have ever since only bought that brand and have even introduced friends and family members to it. However, I still wait for their deals to show up before picking up a pair and am vulnerable to their "time running out" campaigns. I click "Buy", assured that at least I won't be stuck with a substandard product.

I like to think that if I ever build a product, I would focus on quality and attract the kind of customer I myself am and would never stoop to the lowly FOMO tactics, even for assured short term gains.

You have the same situation with time limited sales on Amazon for instance. It should be rising your FOMO to the roof, but as a consumer you know there will be another sale in 2 month, or really it could be any day, and if you were to miss this sale on an item you wanted, you'd just wait for the next sale.

On the other side, Nike shoes actually disappear from the line up. There's models that were functionally different that I regret not stock-piling when they were still in production. And they were not marketed as exclusives or limited, they just got discontinued. It's not FOMO, it's actual time scarcity.

Price trackers (apps and browser plugins) crowd source scrape prices and can show you the price history on a chart so you see the sales and how frequent they are and when they happen. Sometime soon I expect there may be a push to have laws that require price history transparency since if the price triples the old positive reviews may no longer apply and should not be showcased as if they do.

Otherwise for anything that doesn't need reputability and/or are seen as near consumables, I think people just grab whatever's on sale and go on with their life. When there is no real differentiator from the start, it's hard to have FOMO about a specific item only available for a limited period.

I'm a NYT subscriber in spite of their sleazy sales and retention tactics, not because of them. The product is reputable and unique enough that they get away with sales tactics that would otherwise be a turn off.

I’ve signed up for museum memberships because of a specific event that required it, or because I got a call reminding me of losing some benefit or announcing some made-up deadline for a matching contribution. I have long-term relationship with them. But I really don’t care enough to act without a nudge.

> will either switch to a competitor out of spite

This doesn’t sound like a personality that will remain with power or wealth for a long time. Controlled spite can be effective, reputationally. Random spite never is.

Yes FOMO in your example can motivate. The problem is, not the types you want an LTR with.

Based on my experience with Kickstarters (especially board game Kickstarters), as long as you actually deliver the product that you said you're going to, there's no negative consequences to using FOMO.