I just straight-up ignore "sale" claims now, unless I have personal experience that says this really is a sale. This is mostly limited to groceries where I definitely know that the $4 bag of chips really is on sale at $1.50. Along with all the active deception, I also just count all the times I've gone price shopping for non-trivial things and the prices I see and how festooned with the word "sale" the page is is simply uncorrelated.
I have been truck shopping lately which means I'm constantly hounded all day long by every dealership in the 4 state region. Last weekend they ALL had "Memorial Day Sales"! So I asked them all about the sale details... Every single one said if I came in they would try to make a deal with me. That's the same thing as no sale. Actually, it is worse for cars where a sale might entail negotiating against a dealer markup.
Also just because something is in a larger size, it doesn’t always make the prices better. Once I was at Fred Meyer and the 1 pound bags of lentils were $1.50 but the two pound bags were $4.00. They were charging more for larger handling units.
I go to a store where they put the price per kilo, even when it is discounted. This way, I only need to compare price per kilo with other products to see if it's worth it!
Manufacturers and retailers will also change models for sales. Black Friday sales are sometimes cheaper, lower quality versions. Discount clothing retailers sometimes get items made specifically for them. And that's ignoring bad QA. Patagonia just filed a lawsuit against Nordstrom Rack for selling counterfeit clothing.
Yup. A lot of the consumer protection regulations are being totally ignored with impunity. It’s nice to see one retailer held to account. But I don’t think it foretells a larger trend.
These days you need to be very aware of what a fair price is for any given thing and then shop around to find the best deal based on that understanding. Totally ignore %-off, initial prices. Just look for the deal based on what you know a fair price to be.
I think a lot of online stores can get away with this sort of thing because they use “airline” pricing. Everyone sees a different price based on the store’s heuristics, thus there is no “one” price aside from MSRP. and so they can claim a discount off that.
I once bought three different three-for-two offers in the UK, expecting to get the 3rd, 6th & 9th most expensive items free, but I was actually charged for all but the 7th-9th, which would have cost me a lot more
(I got the price I expected in the end, by making three separate purchases)
I also saw a competing chain labelling food nearing its use-by date with a higher price than otherwise identical items with longer to go, but presumably that was a genuine error
this is why crowdsourced (or otherwise) tools like https://keepa.com/ are great. because you can determine if something is a sale, not by the dark patterns utilized by your adversary, but by using historical data.
we need a decentralized version such that amazon can't just do in and bribe/pay to remove their products from it though.
That $1.50 bag of chips still cost the store 50 cents.
Red Bull cost pennies per gallon.
You see… the pricing of goods is arbitrary, as in mutable given human philosophical whims, not coupled to the movement of the universe otherwise, we’ve hallucinated an entire cottage industry around social sharing but only so long as everyone is socially sharing the right people are rich.
Our culture is itself something an AI might hallucinate.
Why everyone knows Martha Stewart has always been X rich so we will inflate the money supply with those immutable truths in mind and oops now thanks to her investment help she’s richer and everyone else without an investment team is poorer. Should have capitalized harder.
> In some cases, consumers paid more for the add-on monitor advertised as "discounted" than they would have paid if they had bought it as a stand-alone product
That's insane. Reminds me of LTT's secret shopper incident where they rejected Dell's suggested extra warranty package and then Dell included two mutually exclusive warranty packages that you cannot even intentionally select simultaneously on their website.
That scenario is rampant in government. Dell prices SSDs, RAM, etc. insanely high and, after a quick email, you can get a huge “discount” to show your boss. Just ignore the fact that you’re still paying 2-3x market value.
Ex: I recently saw it with server RAM. $1700 (CAD) from Dell (via service tag) for something that’s $100 CAD from Crucial, but “discounted” to a few hundred after an email. Or $600 SSDs marked up to $3500. It’s a big scam.
Dell also sends “itemized” invoices where every item is listed, but the price is one big total. Descriptions are intentionally, in my opinion, obfuscated to resist price comparing and auditing. We need a massive audit of government spending on tech IMO. Companies like Dell are price gouging.
Isn't this standard operating procedure for anything retail? Why is Dell being singled out?
Amazon is notorious about this. Look at the prices before one of their "events" on items, and then when the "event" starts you'll see that the price is the same only they list a higher price as the original and show the normal price as the sales price. So there's no difference in price before/after the event.
Brick and mortar stores like JC Penny, Sears, Macy's, etc do the same thing where every week there are "sales". They all play on the psychology of the word "sale".
Why not? Someone is going to be singled out. You can't really go after everyone simultaneously.
This reminds me of a story I heard of a guy who was speeding, but going the same speed as everyone else. He got stopped and as the cop was writing the ticket, he said "why are you singling me out, when everyone else was speeding too?"
The cop said "I can't stop everyone. You just drew the short straw this time."
All the brick and mortar stores you name don't play it quite like that (anymore). If there is a sale it was available for a higher price before, and probably will be for a higher price again. Of course stuff at the "regular price" is always in the back and nobody tries to sell it to you - there is almost the same thing up front with the big sale signs over it that the staff is trying to sell. If you really want the staff will be happy to ring up the regular priced goods for you, but there is no incentive for them to do so: the regular price exists only so they can lower the prices for the sale and not run afoul of the laws that require a sale price to be cheaper.
Why the hell are you worried about dell being singled out instead of thinking "At least one of these bastards is being held accountable!" Everyone one of them should pay, but I'm glad that today it's Dell.
I'm always baffled by this argument. So because two people do a bad thing neither can be held accountable because each can just point at the other and dylan604 will say one is being singled out?
Dells online store is a nightmare of dark patterns. Everything on there is 2-3x as expensive as it should be, except it’s always on a huge sale that is changing all the time
> It's tempting to jump on sales that are presented as steals. But when it comes to online shopping, you can't trust every sale price (or review, or seller) you see.
Surely this isn't limited to online shopping. In the days of yore, when I sold PCs at Circuit City, my store would put together package deals where you bought a PC, monitor, printer, etc. The prices for the package deals were the same as if you bought everything together, but we'd put it all on one tag, at a single price, and also show the total you could get in mail-in rebates from the whole package. Because it was advertised as a package, people assumed it was cheaper, oftentimes.
I've been shopping Dell.com for 23 years. They've been doing fake discount for 23 years. Price delta isn't as big as it used to be, but they make it hard to do comparison shopping even within their own site.
For other people in developing countries: Isn't it weird to see news about a massive outrage for practices that in our place are totally common?
Where I'm from, this happens all the time. And the law permits them to just change the price at whim. So they can just raise the price of any product and slap a "discount" label on them, even if the new "discounted" price is higher than the previous one.
In Tunisia, North Africa we have laws against that. It works even in third world, because those bad practices do not benefit the business, they really need to get rid of inventory sometimes and they need to do it in a safe trusted way.
Secret Lab Chairs still get away with listing totally imaginary “Non-Direct Pricing” despite the ASA saying- and I quote- “we think it likely to have breached the Advertising Codes (“the Codes”) that we administer.” And their 5-year warranty extension obliges you to become part of a social media Astro-turfing program- https://secretlab.co.uk/pages/redeem
If I am buying anything, on sale or otherwise, I do my best to look up historical prices. It's gotten to be a pain in the ass to be a consumer. I feel like we used to have consumer protections, but not any more.
This is pathetic, but their U/UP line of monitors is really good. In fact I'm using them for the last 10 years or so. Back in the day, Dell was one of very few manufacturers who offered monitors with 16:10 screens, which are are far better at 24" size than 16:9. (The difference is not that noticeable with 27"+ screens and bigger)
Dealing with them on an institutional basis is bad too. Use to be I’d email our sales rep with a configuration and request for a quote. Usually a week later they’d come back with a price that would be substantially lower vs the website listed price. Now they have us use the Dell premier site where Dell says that the prices are already discounted and ready to go. For the most part the premiere pricing is the same as the normal website.
This is rampant and goes well beyond Dell. Take the Black Friday "deals", particularly on TVs. Retailers are known to slowly rise prices leading up to Black Friday to be able to advertise a steep "discount" (which honestly isn't that steep).
It's honestly exhausting as a consumer dealing with all these tricks.
This is everything in the Lenovo online store. I signed up for a business account and called a rep on the phone and got a quote for a single machine and the rep gave me a discount of 15% and then when I went on the website the exact same machine was 35% off (and is perpetually on sale for that discounted amount).
I think everyone in the USA knows that retailers will add stick a new label for $100 over the original $50 label, and then announce "50% off sale!" with impunity. I've literally peeled off the $100 sticker to find the $50 sticker underneath. In the UK and other places, this is illegal.
This is frequently a way to soften the impact of inflation. The trick I've been watching my grocery store use the last two years is a product will get a "clearance" tag on it with the price marked down 20 to 30 cents. They let the current stock sell out (or simply not restock the shelf) so it sits empty for a week. Then the same item reappears marked up 50 cents from the previous regular price. Occasionally there'll be different packaging so it appears more like a "new" product. But a few times I was able to compare the old with the new and it's always been the exact same thing.
They also have the most ridiculous markups I've ever seen. We went rug shopping and my wife found a rug she liked. Price tag? $35,000! The salesman "liked us so much" he was willing to drop it to $10,000. I asked him a question he had to go look up, and when he did I snapped a picture of the label, before telling him we had to think about it overnight. Found the exact same rug online for $500 delivered, and that is what now sits in our living room.
It's strange that "sales" claims are relevant at all. Rationally, you should make your decision based on whether the product is worth the price, not based on what the price is at other times and for other people.
You're right, and the obvious conclusion is that people are not rational. Next, then, it's strange that many others expect this from them. It's denying an integral part of human experience.
I do get what you mean though. People need to look after themselves, because when they are not caring about something, others do, and many make their living out of this.
[+] [-] jerf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tfandango|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway173738|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bibanez|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
Here is a page from Amazon explaining it: https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/gp/help/customer/display.html...
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|2 years ago|reply
These days you need to be very aware of what a fair price is for any given thing and then shop around to find the best deal based on that understanding. Totally ignore %-off, initial prices. Just look for the deal based on what you know a fair price to be.
I think a lot of online stores can get away with this sort of thing because they use “airline” pricing. Everyone sees a different price based on the store’s heuristics, thus there is no “one” price aside from MSRP. and so they can claim a discount off that.
[+] [-] lambertsimnel|2 years ago|reply
(I got the price I expected in the end, by making three separate purchases)
I also saw a competing chain labelling food nearing its use-by date with a higher price than otherwise identical items with longer to go, but presumably that was a genuine error
[+] [-] purplecats|2 years ago|reply
we need a decentralized version such that amazon can't just do in and bribe/pay to remove their products from it though.
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlypositive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anlaw|2 years ago|reply
Red Bull cost pennies per gallon.
You see… the pricing of goods is arbitrary, as in mutable given human philosophical whims, not coupled to the movement of the universe otherwise, we’ve hallucinated an entire cottage industry around social sharing but only so long as everyone is socially sharing the right people are rich.
Our culture is itself something an AI might hallucinate.
Why everyone knows Martha Stewart has always been X rich so we will inflate the money supply with those immutable truths in mind and oops now thanks to her investment help she’s richer and everyone else without an investment team is poorer. Should have capitalized harder.
[+] [-] alpaca128|2 years ago|reply
That's insane. Reminds me of LTT's secret shopper incident where they rejected Dell's suggested extra warranty package and then Dell included two mutually exclusive warranty packages that you cannot even intentionally select simultaneously on their website.
[+] [-] donmcronald|2 years ago|reply
Ex: I recently saw it with server RAM. $1700 (CAD) from Dell (via service tag) for something that’s $100 CAD from Crucial, but “discounted” to a few hundred after an email. Or $600 SSDs marked up to $3500. It’s a big scam.
Dell also sends “itemized” invoices where every item is listed, but the price is one big total. Descriptions are intentionally, in my opinion, obfuscated to resist price comparing and auditing. We need a massive audit of government spending on tech IMO. Companies like Dell are price gouging.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
Amazon is notorious about this. Look at the prices before one of their "events" on items, and then when the "event" starts you'll see that the price is the same only they list a higher price as the original and show the normal price as the sales price. So there's no difference in price before/after the event.
Brick and mortar stores like JC Penny, Sears, Macy's, etc do the same thing where every week there are "sales". They all play on the psychology of the word "sale".
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
Why not? Someone is going to be singled out. You can't really go after everyone simultaneously.
This reminds me of a story I heard of a guy who was speeding, but going the same speed as everyone else. He got stopped and as the cop was writing the ticket, he said "why are you singling me out, when everyone else was speeding too?"
The cop said "I can't stop everyone. You just drew the short straw this time."
[+] [-] eterm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autoexec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketralnis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbariangrunge|2 years ago|reply
It’s too much, I can’t shop there
[+] [-] jwestbury|2 years ago|reply
Surely this isn't limited to online shopping. In the days of yore, when I sold PCs at Circuit City, my store would put together package deals where you bought a PC, monitor, printer, etc. The prices for the package deals were the same as if you bought everything together, but we'd put it all on one tag, at a single price, and also show the total you could get in mail-in rebates from the whole package. Because it was advertised as a package, people assumed it was cheaper, oftentimes.
[+] [-] pcurve|2 years ago|reply
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/sr/desktop...
[+] [-] leidenfrost|2 years ago|reply
Where I'm from, this happens all the time. And the law permits them to just change the price at whim. So they can just raise the price of any product and slap a "discount" label on them, even if the new "discounted" price is higher than the previous one.
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[+] [-] jmyeet|2 years ago|reply
It's honestly exhausting as a consumer dealing with all these tricks.
[+] [-] leetrout|2 years ago|reply
This is everything in the Lenovo online store. I signed up for a business account and called a rep on the phone and got a quote for a single machine and the rep gave me a discount of 15% and then when I went on the website the exact same machine was 35% off (and is perpetually on sale for that discounted amount).
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[+] [-] amadeuspagel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npteljes|2 years ago|reply
I do get what you mean though. People need to look after themselves, because when they are not caring about something, others do, and many make their living out of this.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply