71–80 of 171 posts
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That's why the UE law that requires the shops to display the lowest price over last 30 days is pretty useful
Eu directive 2019/2161, which regulates this, was supposed to be in effect since 28.5.2022, but I see nothing on local retailers webpages, nor in physical stores ):
https://www.nextinpact.com/lebrief/71805/ufc-que-choisir-por...
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.
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
Probably the same in many other countries.
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".
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I love when publix doubles the price of an item and puts it on bogo to seem like it's on sale. Y'all aint fooling anyone
In my experience, they don't do this. I'm a very regular person, in that I buy the same things for long stretches until I get tired of them, so I know what the long term prices of things are. I always stock up on bogos at Publix, since they have always been true bogos. I've never seen them inflate the price just to bogo it. In fact, I don't recall Publix ever playing price shenanigans. They are one of the most honest…
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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!
Sometimes (at least in the UK) that number is wrong, possibly intentionally. The only really sure way is to do the calculation yourself. Unless the weight is wrong too.
I remember shopping for kitchen roll once, one product had a per-price that was per 100 sheets, the other per roll. Impossible to decipher!
> 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.
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.
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Think Lenovo does the same.
And for some reason some tech journalists don't account for it. "Ah, but this Thinkpad has an MSRP of $4,395, so it's much more expensive than the competition" when approximately nobody would purchase it for that price, and the consistently-on-sale price would be right in line with competitors.
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 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.
It's not without perverse effects though. Often you see price increases in October/November so that a discount can be advertised in December, but it's just the same as or barely-discounted from the September price.
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