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Those seedy furniture stores that have "going out of business" sales that seem to last for years, are often running the same scam. Grocery also stores do this,

Those seedy furniture stores that have "going out of business" sales that seem to last for years, are often running the same scam. Grocery also stores do this, with their shoppers cards discounts. Consumers are the other half of the problem though. At least some of the scummy tactics are psycological hacks to get around real irrational behaviors that actually work against both the consumer and the business. The rest are dark patterns meant to manipulate and coerce that work strictly for the business, consumers be damned. I'm not sure where the line is. Side note: Even to this day, I still catch myself sometimes thinking/saying the cost of something is $X rather than $X+1, when the listing price of something is $X.99, and I curse myself for the foolishness :P

baud147258 7y ago
> real irrational behaviors that actually work against both the consumer and the business Do you have examples of such behaviors?
- pixl97 7y ago
  Look up JC Penny sales. Their CEO got rid of sales and marked the products down so the normal cost was the sale price. They almost went out of business.
Doubl 7y ago
Years ago in the UK, the prices were commonly, say, £9 19s 11d instead of £10, that is a discount of 1/240 of a pound
save_ferris 7y ago
I worked at my uncle’s shoe store as a kid, and he was a huge believer in marking down prices below the recommended MSRP. He even refused to set up an online store so his vendors wouldn’t know what he was doing. The only thing was that there were never any discounts whatsoever. We lived in a military community and I literally couldn’t count the number of times a customer would walk in and ask for a military discount. We were trained to politely explain our pricing and encourage shoppers to price-check our offerings against any place else. And often customers would demand to give us a discount because they served in $MILITARY_CONFLICT. No matter how much we tried pointing out that our shoes were effectively on sale in perpetuity, they simply wouldn’t believe us. The psychology of the sale is real.

baud147258 7y ago

> real irrational behaviors that actually work against both the consumer and the business Do you have examples of such behaviors?

pixl97 7y ago
Look up JC Penny sales. Their CEO got rid of sales and marked the products down so the normal cost was the sale price. They almost went out of business.

Doubl 7y ago

Years ago in the UK, the prices were commonly, say, £9 19s 11d instead of £10, that is a discount of 1/240 of a pound

save_ferris 7y ago

I worked at my uncle’s shoe store as a kid, and he was a huge believer in marking down prices below the recommended MSRP. He even refused to set up an online store so his vendors wouldn’t know what he was doing. The only thing was that there were never any discounts whatsoever. We lived in a military community and I literally couldn’t count the number of times a customer would walk in and ask for a military discount. We were trained to politely explain our pricing and encourage shoppers to price-check our offerings against any place else. And often customers would demand to give us a discount because they served in $MILITARY_CONFLICT. No matter how much we tried pointing out that our shoes were effectively on sale in perpetuity, they simply wouldn’t believe us. The psychology of the sale is real.