"The answer is yes (with qualifiers). Many late adopters are late adopters because they are holding out for a cheaper price for those goods. From personal experience, I've done this very thing (waiting for prices to come down on a TV before I bought it). I put that money into something with a higher return for the time being."
But you could have kept waiting and prices would have kept falling. Eventually you spent your money anyway. This seems to indicate that it wasn't the situation of falling prices that prevented you from buying a TV, since that never changed, but some external factor.
"But, the reason that's not exactly a fair comparison is that the currency itself (in this case, USD) was not deflating. Ergo, my "hoarding" was actually putting it into something with a better return for the time being, which was available because the currency was stable. If the best return I could get was holding on to my money (instead of putting it in some sort of investment vehicle), then that would be deflation."
The currency was deflating relative to TVs. Holding cash does provide a better return than holding a TV. The value of a TV depreciates much faster than cash. That's the point--why would anyone ever buy a TV when if they just held onto their money for a month they could always get a better TV for the same amount? Since TV prices are always falling, this question reduces to: why would anyone ever buy a TV? The answer is pretty simple--people want TVs. At some point if they want one, they're just going to buy one regardless of what the prices are doing, just like you did. So where's the problem?
But you could have kept waiting and prices would have kept falling. Eventually you spent your money anyway. This seems to indicate that it wasn't the situation of falling prices that prevented you from buying a TV, since that never changed, but some external factor.
Prices don't fall linearly, in many cases, but hit a floor representing the cost of manufacturing and distribution. Then, different brands have different price decay curves. Finally, the price decay of a given good has to be offset against the buyer's utility function. In practice, I don't sit there and calculate everything out; I start with a budget and a list of manufacturers I prefer, and then look for the best products that fit within those constraints.
People who want TVs (or who want to replace their current TVs) will buy one eventually. But if you’re in the TV-manufacturing business, there’s a big difference between a world in which the average TV gets replaced every three years and a world in which it gets replaced every four years.
Why do people line up for things like day-after-Thanksgiving sales? Because they know that the retailer is offering someting they want that will become more expensive later. So yeah, people who want TVs, and who think that TVs are about to become more expensive, will hurry up to get TVs, while those who think that TVs are about to become cheaper will put off their purchases.
In countries that have hyperinflation, you see extreme cases of this: middle-class consumers spend their paychecks as soon as the money is deposited, because they’d rather have anything on hand than cash in the bank.
But you could have kept waiting and prices would have kept falling. Eventually you spent your money anyway. This seems to indicate that it wasn't the situation of falling prices that prevented you from buying a TV, since that never changed, but some external factor.
"But, the reason that's not exactly a fair comparison is that the currency itself (in this case, USD) was not deflating. Ergo, my "hoarding" was actually putting it into something with a better return for the time being, which was available because the currency was stable. If the best return I could get was holding on to my money (instead of putting it in some sort of investment vehicle), then that would be deflation."
The currency was deflating relative to TVs. Holding cash does provide a better return than holding a TV. The value of a TV depreciates much faster than cash. That's the point--why would anyone ever buy a TV when if they just held onto their money for a month they could always get a better TV for the same amount? Since TV prices are always falling, this question reduces to: why would anyone ever buy a TV? The answer is pretty simple--people want TVs. At some point if they want one, they're just going to buy one regardless of what the prices are doing, just like you did. So where's the problem?