Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 171 posts

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

#81

Post by bottom999mottob »

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.

Stores do this with shop towels too and it's aggravating. Why can't I buy bulk shop towels for less?!

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

#83

Post by guraf »

emdashcomma wrote: post #66
andromeduck wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure that's on reviewers. Lenovo is using anti consumer tactics to improve sales (the elevated MSRP with a constant "sale"), should they be praised?

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

#84

Post by technothrasher »

briandear wrote: post #43

Is it me, or does it seem like oriental rug shops are constantly having “going out of business sales?”

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.

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

#85

Post by jerf »

dcow wrote: post #69
lotsofpulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco is pretty good about their sale prices being lower than most times.

Came here to say this. At this point I consider it part of Costco’s brand that I can trust I’m getting close to the lowest possible price for a product when I buy from them. Sure Costco still has it’s own deals and sales pop up on a cadence (for example, never buy tires off-sale because they run the tire sale basically ever 6 weeks, the Traeger event happens something like quarterly, etc.), but overall they’re trustw…

Agree with lotsofpulp about the sales being valid.

I have found that Costco prices are not always the lowest, but that still doesn't always mean they're a bad deal. While in an ideal world, anywhere you can pick up a Brand X product Y, it should be the same, that's not actually the case anymore. (I presume Wal-Mart didn't create this reality, but they have had a disproportional role in propagating it.) Of all things, I notice that the canned black olives I buy at Costco are consistently a step up from the exact same brand at my local megamart. So even though they aren't actually that much cheaper I still prefer to buy them there.

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

#86

Post by jerf »

onlypositive wrote: post #30
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…

Wait til this guy learns about free shipping.

Obviously, there is no such thing as free shipping. Yes, I also just consider that part of the price.

Coincidentally in the past couple of days I've been doing a lot of shopping in a space where the good is nominally ~$10 but shipping is ~$20. I've heard that there's a lot of distortions like that brought on by various storefront systems not allowing you to set per-item shipping prices sufficiently granularly, and the store owners will compensate by setting their target shipping price in whatever manner they can and then making the target item price whatever it needs to be to work out. For the particular things I'm shopping for (semi-obscure CDs), $30 is a reasonable price with shipping, so I bought without complaining, because the "shipping price" isn't really relevant to me, only the final price I pay.

For a while you could kind of run some scams where you the store aggregation sites would show you as the cheapest because your price was $1 and the sort order would ignore your $25 shipping fee, sorting you in front of the shop selling for $5 and $5 shipping, but all the aggregators I've seen lately have switched to sorting by price + shipping so that doesn't work anymore.

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

#87

Post by npteljes »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #82

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.

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

#88

Post by SkyPuncher »

technothrasher wrote: post #80
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

When my wife worked for Dell, she got a 17% employee discount on all Dell branded products on their website. But it was 17% off list price, not current "sale" price. So using your employee discount often would cause you pay more for the product than if you didn't use it.

This has been my experience with nearly every "discount" program. You always pay more because it's anchored to some other price.

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

#89

Post by npteljes »

allarm wrote: post #45
willcipriano wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is very common in Singapore for example. Basically everything is "on sale" all the time. So it's not about developing countries.

From the Wiki, Singapore declared themselves as a developing country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country#By_self_dec...

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

#90

Post by Semaphor »

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 is mandatory in Germany (probably EU)
Post reply on HN