I feel like it would have been better if they raised the price to $2 during the sale
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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There's a famous case study where JC Penny launched a big campaign where they wouldn't put people thought the rat race of sales and coupons and just offer the best price at all times. Almost bankrupted them. Turns out people want the rat race.
People want to feel like they got a good deal. Making them do a little bit of work or seeing that marked down sign gives them that feeling.
People don't want the rat race anymore than we want to pay exorbitant prices for healthcare or housing or food. But making customers happy isn't as profitable.
Think about it. If everything was always available at the cheapest possible price, what would your shopping habits look like? You would buy things exactly when you need them. If you have to deal with higher normal prices and occasional sales, then you need to plan ahead and buy when things are cheap instead of when you need them. That means buying more stuff than you need because you didn't plan adequately and got stuff that you never ended up needing.
The CEO who implemented it also was the guy who basically created the Apple Store, and thought that the very successful approach for Apple would translate into a more premium experience for a mid level clothing retailer. Important lessons were learned about how consumer behavior may differ between different items, even if the consumers are largely the same people.
I thought that was Payless shoes
Not aware of a Payless comp to this. They did have a campaign where they put their cheap shoes in a luxury pop-up store and had influencers gush about the high quality products which was pretty funny.
I've never seen a furniture store that wasn't having a gigantic "sale".
There's a furniture store in my city that's had a going out of business sale for the last 25 years.
All businesses are going out of business, it's just a matter of how long it will take
LAST DAY OPEN!
the next day
LAST DAY! WE MEAN IT THIS TIME!
Ikea?
While supplies last. Going out of business, final sale
If you buy 2 you save twice as much. 😋
Modern sales are now "was $25, now $2", then sale ends and the price is $3.
Lenovo be like
Fun fact, it's illegal to say something is on sale when it isn't lower than their normal price, so they'll use weasel words you can watch out for.
"Compare to", "originally", "Hot Deal", "Special Buy", "[Insert holiday] special", etc.
Wait, "hot deal" and "originally" get around this?? How literally is that law worded?? "Hot deal" is definitely just a synonym but "originally" is even more explicitly a lie than "on sale"!
"Originally" just means it used to be that price. at some point, not that it's still the regular price.
That's something that might be used on an older model laptop or cell phone.
"Hot Deal" can me something that's considered valuable even at regular price. The Black Friday products that are produced specifically to be cheap for Black Friday can fall into this category. I worked at a retailer that had $10 blue jeans shipped in just for that sale every year, so $10 was their regular price even though they were a "good value".
Illegal where? I doubt that's a federal law in the US.
I doubt that's a regulated federal law in the US.
About as useful as our warranty laws
It is. Here's the link to the rules on deeptive pricing in the Code of Federal Regulations.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-233
going off memory, I believe it depends on region, but yes federally I don't think it cares as long as the price is correctly shown and the "was price" is not higher than it had ever been listed as
My first reaction was that there's no way this tactic makes a significant improvement in sales, but then I remembered prime day is a thing.
It works extremely well, that's why many countries have regulations on the practice.
Final panel, on the money
I wish this was true anymore, but I was the the grocery store today looking at how the 6-pack ramen noodles are now $2.56. I can remember when they were a quarter. Not a quarter of 2.50, but just 25 cents.
$.16 when I was in college. That's $.42 in 2025 money, so same price with inflation (from 1989).
I mean, that's fair, I figured it was probably close to inflation adjusted, but it's still absolutely mad to see. I'm finally beginning to understand why my boomer dad would go around having a fucking stroke at all the prices in 2007; I think at some level, your frame of reference for what something costs gets stuck in whatever it was in your teens and early 20s.
This is literally the Khol’s business model
Man fuck that place. I got my all time fav sport coat there out of shit luck, never bought anything else. Even got their CC, never used.
Crypto:
I know so many people who regularly fall for this sort of thing, even when they know it's not actually a deal or something they need.