101–110 of 250 posts
> A coffee mug that usually sells for $10 + $3 S&H will go for $13, with FREE shipping. I actually prefer this. It's much better than shops that activity try to hide shipping costs until the last moment. Also it makes comparing prices quicker.
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I usually don't like language that suggests that consumers are brainwashed by marketing. But, getting people to comprehend that spending money =/= saving money is surprisingly difficult. Even when they understand money has been spent, it's not spent rationally: money "saved" at the grocery store doesn't actually mean less total money spent, rather the same amount as usual is spent, and more food than usual was able t…
I'm not sure I get what you mean. If I go to the store with a list of the usual items I purchased and some of those items are on sale, I end up spending less money for the exact same items.
We have some Belgian waffles that cost 18 NOK a piece. They always have an offer that gives you 2 for 20 NOK.
I never eat more than one of these and they end up spoiling as they don't last very long, and even if it seems that I'm "saving" 16 NOK on the purchase I'm actually spending 2 more than I otherwise would.
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I don't have hard numbers to quote on this, but I'm very convinced that you end up paying more in the end. From my own experience and pretty much every one I talk about this, people have a tendency to buy things they'll never need. (I constantly try not to do that, but it takes active thinking about it all the time.) No discount deal is cheaper than the one where you don't buy something you don't need. Then there's u…
A long running promotion in Tesco is 3 bottles of any brand beer for £5.25. I can't imagine anyone ever goes into a store with the intention of buying 3 bottles but if you just buy 2 you're misguided into thinking you'll lose out. In reality, you're spending more and drinking more than you really want to.
Everything even vaguely commercial with the word "free" attached is shady. I'm in a minority here (I must be, otherwise it would stop being common because it wouldn't bring in enough marks) but I've grown cynical enough that the word actually puts me on guard and I go searching for the small print, or it just puts me off completely if I don't have time for the small print. It isn't just BOGO offers, anything free is…
> * First month free! (if you don't cancel 27 days before the free month ends you'll be paying for the service for at least 6 months afterwards) yes, this is a terrible bait and switch - and should be illegal unless the fine print isn't so fine that nobody reads it.
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Amazon is just convenient though. Other companies don't have stuff like the lockers which are really useful if you're working full-time and live alone.
It depends where you live. Walmart can be convenient too. The prices are about the same as Amazon and depending on where you live you can have your product in hand in however long it takes to pick it up locally (~30 minutes or less let's say). Order it online, pick it up locally. And if it's not available in the store right now, they ship it to their store for free in usually a day or 2. No membership required.
Picking up locally is not great if you don't drive.
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A long running promotion in Tesco is 3 bottles of any brand beer for £5.25. I can't imagine anyone ever goes into a store with the intention of buying 3 bottles but if you just buy 2 you're misguided into thinking you'll lose out. In reality, you're spending more and drinking more than you really want to.
But if you did want to buy 3, or 6 or even 12 bottles then it is actually a saving. It's about shopping smart.
I may be in a minority, but I prefer to buy a couple of beers just once in a while.
I've been living in Thailand for a while now and the market is so unregulated and abused by these sorts of deals. A big super market near my house runs 2for1 buns every day for the past year. I've got desensitised to the point where I don't even see the "original price" anymore. The deal price is just the real and only price. The only real deals are the "almost expiring" price reductions super markets put out before…
Are regulations supposed to stop that behavior? There's plenty of grocery stores in NY that continuously run the same "special" on the same items. I've seen the same hot dogs on sale for the same price for a year.
My local pizza shop offers "Buy one get one free" and "Free delivery". They also offer a discount if you only want one pizza, and a discount if you collect instead of having it delivered.
I'd argue this is legitimate, or at least everyone is footing the bill when you request delivery. But that's no different than everyone footing the bill for having tables and chairs in the shop.
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Doesn't always work though, some web sites also manage to block scrolling of the main content which may not always be easy to figure out (esp. on messy web sites with megatons of JavaScript code, HTML and CSS). And surely there are browser plugins that help you remove annoying DOM elements in one click?
uBlock Origin has a visual picker, which also saves the blocking rule for future visits: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker
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> This isn't even getting into the actual value of perceived value (cf. the sticker price of wine vs. its perceived quality). Really interesting stuff. I fall foul of this trick quite a lot when food shopping. For example if I'm buying a box of cereals and I see one is priced at £1.80 and another is priced at £2.50 but is on sale from £3.50 I'll buy the more expensive one because I'm under the illusion that I'm getti…
What I ended up doing in order to avoid this is that I’ve been buying from the same brands for some time now, i.e. the same soap, the same shampoo, the same butter (truth be told, for butter I fluctuate between two brands), the same chocolate, the same detergent etc. This way I don’t fall for tricks like the one you mentioned because I almost don’t care about any other brands and products than the ones I’m really int…
Maybe it's different in the UK than in other places, but the large supermarket chains are constantly running so many promotions that you can, if very brand disloyal, always shop smart based on bogofs and alike.