I feel like it would have been better if they raised the price to $2 during the sale
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".
Ikea?
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".
Modern sales are now "was $25, now $2", then sale ends and the price is $3.
Lenovo be like
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.
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.
This is literally the Khol’s business model
Final panel, on the money
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.
