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Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

arstechnica.com

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Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#51

Post by ct0 »

Pxtl wrote: post #39
jerf wrote: post #16

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 sim…

I tend to use CamelCamelCamel to find out if I'm getting an actual deal on something, at least when shopping online.

the best addon is Keepa, they have a time series price tracking thats added right in the page

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#52

Post by pcurve »

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.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/sr/desktop...

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#53

Post by [deleted] »

bibanez wrote: post #48
jerf wrote: post #16

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 sim…

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!

[deleted]

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#55

Post by RulerOf »

bibanez wrote: post #48
jerf wrote: post #16

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 sim…

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!

This was really frustrating when I had to be price sensitive shopping for paper towels. They'd list price per roll in the corner of the tag, but every package's rolls were significantly different cm^2 quantities.

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#56

Post by eduction »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #41
jerf wrote: post #16

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 sim…

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.

That's interesting. I once wrote to a coffee company because online they were selling their big bags of beans at more per ounce than the small bags. The co-owner wrote back and explained that the smaller bags were in way more third party stores than the big bags so they had to delay the price increase on those (I think to give the store network more notice so one store wasn't undercutting another). Needless to say I ordered a bunch of cheaper smaller bags to stock up ahead of the price bump. Anyway no idea if that's what was going on at Fred Meyer but I suppose it's possible the lentil supply chain is equally complex.

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#57

Post by Retric »

bushbaba wrote: post #32
vxNsr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kno…

Online stores can list the SKU for 50% more than their sales price for 1 day, and delist the product from showing up in searches unless you specifically ask for that SKU. Then subsequent days they being the price down and call it a sale. Totally within the rules.

Depends on jurisdiction but in some locations non sales price must be consistent for a significant percentage of the total time or it’s still considered deceptive marketing. Thus countering both short term price bumps and “sales” that last for 3/4th of a year.

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#58

Post by andromeduck »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #29

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 too much, I can’t shop there

Think Lenovo does the same.

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#59

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Makhini wrote: post #37
HumblyTossed wrote: post #33

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.

That's why the UE law that requires the shops to display the lowest price over last 30 days is pretty useful

Seems easy to game by just pretending you're selling a different product every time you change the price.

I worked at a company that did this with digital goods.

Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted

#60

Post by pixl97 »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

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 also coincides with 'SKU explosion'. Back in the day before digital inventory manufactures generally minimized the numbers of SKUs they had because it was a nightmare managing thousands of different products. Circuit City, Best Buy, and whoever else was around at the time would pretty likely have the same TV.

But now each one will have a different SKU number even if they are the exact same product so you cannot easily price match. Coming back a few weeks later to the same store and even then products might have new SKUs. It's just hell keeping up with what features do or don't work on these devices when they are constantly in flux.

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