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Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
121–130 of 171 posts
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Yeah, like how the US is so developed, you can get anything from a surgery to a cable plan at the advertised priced. Hang on, my hotel is calling me. Something about a resort fee...
First world problems
Today I learned how to get left wing people to argue that regulation isn't necessary for a strong economy.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#123I think everyone in the USA knows that retailers will add stick a new label for $100 over the original $50 label, and then announce "50% off sale!" with impunity. I've literally peeled off the $100 sticker to find the $50 sticker underneath. In the UK and other places, this is illegal.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#124Fuck Lenovo too. Overcharging for their laptops then putting them on a huge sale multiple times a month.
Make an account on their pro site --- still nonsense, but the prices stay much more consistent
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#125> 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.
That scenario is rampant in government. Dell prices SSDs, RAM, etc. insanely high and, after a quick email, you can get a huge “discount” to show your boss. Just ignore the fact that you’re still paying 2-3x market value. 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…
> after a quick email, you can get a huge “discount” to show your boss. Just ignore the fact that you’re still paying 2-3x market value.
This is rampant across a lot of enterprise & mid-large B2B vendors because of purchasing departments getting evaluated on the %discount and not by any measure of value for money / market pricing. If purchasing requires a >20% discount to ok your deal, of course the incentive for the seller is to bump the price accordingly and see it waved through.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I also remember another variant on the shipping practice back when there used to be other auction sites competing with eBay. It was standard practice for the site to take a percentage of the sale price, but some sites didn't include the shipping price in that calculation. Thus, the seller made more money off selling a Playstation for $1 with $190 in shipping than they would off selling it for $200 with free shipping. I even remember someone setting up a shipping company that would generate the invoices to "prove" that these were the actual shipping prices. They'd then subcontract the actual shipping out to the USPS and pay an $195 "affiliate loyalty comission" back to the original seller.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are retailers where every week they rearrange the shelves putting the things from the back shelf at "regular price" in front with big on sale signs, and the things that were on sale last week on the back shelves for regular price. They will allow you to buy the things from the back shelves at regular price, but they are trying to sell the things on the front self for half the price.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe OP means Publix doubles the price compared to another grocery store, not to the price they were selling it for last week. I don't live near a Publix, but of the chains near me, one seems to always have BOGO sales, but the prices are more or less twice as much as similar products at other stores.
Yeah, an item that would simply be sold for 2.50 at Walmart is stickered at 5 and bogod at 2.50. I think this is why so many stores avoid selling the same exact brands, so price comparison isn't possible
Since the topic is Dell, I noticed a while ago that the major computer brands (Dell, HP, Lenovo, maybe Asus does it too) will have different SKUs for each retail outlet. You could find a computer at two stores with the same specs and same chassis, but because the model number is different by one letter it's excluded from the store's price matching.
But it's also no secret that computers are a loss-leader for retailers that want you to buy additional higher margin products while you're there.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#129Isn't this standard operating procedure for anything retail? Why is Dell being singled out? 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…
All the brick and mortar stores you name don't play it quite like that (anymore). If there is a sale it was available for a higher price before, and probably will be for a higher price again. Of course stuff at the "regular price" is always in the back and nobody tries to sell it to you - there is almost the same thing up front with the big sale signs over it that the staff is trying to sell. If you really want the staff will be happy to ring up the regular priced goods for you, but there is no incentive for them to do so: the regular price exists only so they can lower the prices for the sale and not run afoul of the laws that require a sale price to be cheaper.
Re: Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
#130I 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…
this is why crowdsourced (or otherwise) tools like https://keepa.com/ are great. because you can determine if something is a sale, not by the dark patterns utilized by your adversary, but by using historical data.
we need a decentralized version such that amazon can't just do in and bribe/pay to remove their products from it though.