Infuriating to think that all these places can sell products with a 50% discount and still make money. The rest of the time how much are they raking in? But we are all scraping by and gotta do what we gotta do. Thanks for letting me vent.
They’re offering discounts on stuff they could unload. They have to get them out of the back room to make room for new stock.
Untrue. Most electronics are special made for black Friday and are worse products marketed as just the same.
Probably most high end products. My TV has like an extra q at the end of the product number to denote that its a blackfriday model. No idea what else is different, but it’s a half inch smaller than the regular model, even though they are both advertised as 60"
It gets more mildly infuriating when you notice that they’ll typically jack up the prices just before a “Sale” to make it seem like a better deal.
See the Anchoring Effect.
I worked for Walmart many many years ago, and this pissed me off to no end. On Thursday I would have to go through and increase the prices on everything that was going to be on sale the following week. Then Saturday morning I had to change all the prices back to what they were (or just a sliver lower). Then I would get bitched at for putting the wrong sign in place (these were supposed to get the “Rollback” signs, not the “Sale” signs, ffs).
Hated that job.
NY State resident here. IIRC, Kaufmann’s got in big trouble with the Attorney General years ago for “sale prices” that allegedly represented discounts from the “usual price”. The usual price was fictitious - the products had never sold for that. I believe it led to a consumer protection law that regulated truth in advertising for sale pricing.
Many/most of the sales are not at a significantly lower cost than most of the time. Prices go up for a month or two before Christmas. For the sales, you might get a good discount on a single item in a store, which is when they expect you to buy other things too to make up for the single sale. Other times many things will be at slight discount, but they might at operating cost or much lower profit margin. You are expected to buy things which are not on sale when the sale is real, otherwise the price was raised for a while and only lowered for the sale. I have also heard that some things are made with lower quality for sales, so you may not be getting the normal quality.
I have never understood how these pathetic replacements of cultural holidays with sales days at a basic level are even slightly believable from the consumer side. The whole point of 99% of sales is to get people in the mood to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t be thinking about buying at that time…. but people are already the most in the mood to buy shit on black friday or cyber monday they will be all year… which makes it the absolute least sensible time to actually offer genuine discounts on items. It would be like a restaurant putting happy hour later into the evening when the restaurant is going to be packed anyways.
The whole “clearing out old stock” or “getting into the black” explanations don’t really make any sense either in a modern, internet based world where companies always have access to a willing market for used or older goods if they set the right price.
It depends, sometimes sales are at a loss for the company to simply clear out stock that they were not selling quickly enough.
So technically a direct loss, but definitely not a direct loss after tax breaks, and accounting for warehouse space freeing up in many cases. The warehouse space is worth more than the product past a certain age in most businesses.
Yes. Either my patience for all the sales has fully evaporated or the sales themselves are becoming truly insufferable (or both), because at this point I do as little shopping Thanksgiving week as possible. And this year I used “Black Friday” sales emails as a reminder to unsubscribe from things.
