151–160 of 171 posts
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
Sounds like hotel bookings. So many “hurry up, 246 people booked this exact room in the past 14 seconds”
"19 people have looked at this room today, book now!"
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…
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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.
That might work with complex electronics, but it sure as shit wont work with most groceries.
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> First world problems ...yes? If you say something doesn't happen in the first world, then the only possible counterargument is someone citing a "first world problem". If "first world problems" aren't a valid example, then that would mean your claim is immune to evidence. Which would make it a useless claim. > Today I learned how to get left wing people to argue that regulation isn't necessary for a strong economy.…
Here's what a third world problem looks like, you don't have power because someone cut down the power poles in your neighborhood to use as firewood, so you walk to the market to buy some cooking oil but the "vegetable oil" ends up making your kids sick because it isn't vegetable oil but instead oil from inside the transformer that used to be on those power poles. You complain but the mayor's brother owns the shop and…
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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.
They don't want to give you a price remotely because they fear you'll just use that to leverage a better price at another dealer. They think if you come in they'll be able to work their charms on you and get you to buy there.
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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!
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.
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It's a hard problem. Some stores have half-size paper towels, which I prefer, as paper towels are unnecessary large most of the time. So I want to price-compare based on number of sheets, not cm² ;)
I have the same issue with rice, they always put the price per kg, never per grain..
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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.
So yes companies will come up with crazy workarounds for such regulations, but the point is such things cost shelf space and worker effort which helps maintain some sanity in the marketplace. Because eventually some company will figure they can save quite a bit of effort and have ‘everyday low prices’ while maintaining better margins.
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.
I needed Q-Tips as I had finally run out of the box I bought years ago.
They had 350 Q-Tips in a box for $3.49. Ok, about 1 per penny.
They also had 500 Q-Tips in a box for $4.99. Practically the same price minus some infinitesimal rounding money.
I was about to reach for the 350 when I noticed they also had a 650 Q-Tip box for... $4.99.
And they were not on sale. None of them were. This was their flat Q-Tip pricing.
I would have guessed that the price should have been $6.49 to keep with the trend, but my guess would have been wronger than using "wronger" in a sentence where you should have used "more wrong" instead.
Isn'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…