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The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufac

by kbos87 4y ago

The marketplace-ization (is there a word for that?) of every retailer feels so short sighted. I’ll throw out an example I’ve noticed lately - furniture manufacturers. Search for any item on Crate & Barrel or West Elm’s website and you’ll first see a handful of exclusive pieces that are clearly built for the brand. Keep scrolling and the search results gradually become a bunch of generic third party items that you can find in a dozen different places, often for lower prices elsewhere. I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation.

adam_arthur 4y ago
I think the marketplace approach will prove less successful in the longer term. I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there. Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end
madaxe_again 4y ago
Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency. There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.
- pmezard 4y ago
  Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    Typically, yeah - it does mean that if you work long enough in the market you start seeing the repetition, and you can start to see individual design houses behind selections at brands, but quality is generally unimpeded as it’s a competitive market, and the economies of scale for both cost and quality achievable by an outsourced designer/manufacturer with low labour costs aren’t insignificant. Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.
  - hattmall 4y ago
    Buying in bulk direct from manufacturers you typically get designs and then quality options. So you can essentially have the exact same product with a wide range of qualities. Things like material density, connector construction and all types of finishing touches from a variety of options. The manufacturer will have a huge assortment of stock products.
- claudiulodro 4y ago
  "ID houses" in this context is interior design, right? How does manufacturing work -- interior designers are typically not manufacturers? This is super interesting to me, so if you have any links or further info about this process, I'd love to know more.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    Industrial design. Whole point is that there’s usually complete vertical integration from conception to manufacturing to logistics, so they can crank out stuff that they can make without a headache with existing toolchains and ship it cheap.
    - claudiulodro 4y ago
      Ah that makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying.
samwillis 4y ago
What I find particularly annoying is that these online “marketplaces” are not curated - they literally sell anything, probably drop shipped. It used to be that you would shop at a branded store, and there was a level of expectation that they had curated their collection so that it was of a quality that matched the stores brand. Some of their wares may be under their own branding, but they would sell other bands too that they had explicitly decided to. You could trust them. By making everything an open marketplace it places the risk onto the customer. They are responsible for reading the reviews and deciding if they think the item will match their expectations. I hate it, being back the days of a store that would stand behind its wares as they had actually chosen to sell them!
- heartbreak 4y ago
  There is one notable exception. The third-party products sold on Apple’s online store are all vetted by Apple. Apple, of course, are masters at guarding their reputation.
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    Costco does a pretty good job. I can purchase something there without research and still get a reasonable product at a reasonable price.
    - 8ytecoder 4y ago
      Yeah, considering the scale, Costco is doing a wonderful job. Plus, their generous return and price adjustment policies, it’s a no brainer to just buy Costco.
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    The difference is in scale. Compare and contrast the quality of Apple's online store for their physical goods with their app store.
  - Philadelphia 4y ago
    By contrast, Apple has let their App Store become a scam marketplace
mcronce 4y ago
> I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation. It's essentially converting reputation to cash
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Is this the "It's my money, and I need it now" / "It's your money, use it when you need it!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg) of execs trying to cash out and bail before things go to shit? My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before? Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy? Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?
  - solveit 4y ago
    Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process which in this case happens to include the reputation they've built up when they used to be a viable business? So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Amazon is killing them and has been for a decade, and they’re trying to compete. Too late, and badly, as it turns out. You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers. Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
I think it is SEO driving this. They want to surface product pages for as much stuff as possible so they contract with some third party to also be a reseller of such goods because it probably requires little overhead. And if it brings traffic then they can try to push their own "sponsored" products. I think it dilutes a brand. I don't know that Walmart has any worthwhile reputation as a brand though (at least in my eyes) to dilute so they're probably selling these things and don't care. When I search on local chain retailer websites, I try to use the "In Store" or "Same day pickup" filters to get actual products they sell. The nice thing is sometimes they indicate the inventory level.
- shaftway 4y ago
  It has some reputation as a brand. If I buy something from Walmart I generally don't expect it to be a quality product. It will fall apart very quickly and it'll probably have some unexpected issue with it. But I do expect that it won't be an *outright* scam.
  - nucleardog 4y ago
    I'm at least fairly confident if I walk into Walmart and buy something it will be minimally fit for purpose and meet the legal requirements to be sold in my country. Meanwhile, you have no problem finding devices that should have FDA/Health Canada/FCC/IC approval and do not.
sp0rk 4y ago
I think this trend of trading in good will towards your brand for a quick buck has been growing powerfully over the last decade or so. It seems like a lot of brands (that make physical products, specifically) have decided to start making "economical versions" of their products that are far inferior to the ones that built up the brand's reputation. This wouldn't be an issue if they were labeled as such, but it seems like it's usually a tactic that's meant to trick you into buying something that you thought was higher quality.
m463 4y ago
I think in Amazon's case, it is slowly degrading into a flea-market type of experience. It's harder and harder to find the good products from decent brands, even with a direct search. Many times the decent brand product seems to be someone independent who is buying the product elsewhere and shipping it on amazon for a markup. Then there's the word-jumble brands for products - they all seem to be fly-by-night products that only seem to exist as long as the product entry has enough stars to get traction. sigh.
- geodel 4y ago
  Now this makes me happy. In sense it shows problem with breathless commentary on how Amazon can just take over front end and whole supply chain back end under its control without any possible challenge. I believe even without regulation (not that I disagree with regulating Amazon) once a critical mass of customer think its shady place to buy good quality stuff. It is downhill for Amazon from there.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Even if you shop for brands on Amazon you have the risk of getting a counterfeit. I was shopping for a particular weightlifting belt that is out of stock on the manufacturer's site. You can find them on Amazon but most likely they are not genuine.
user3939382 4y ago
My general theory is that by the time consumers catch on, the executives behind this have jumped ship to another company whose brand they can also mortgage for a nice-looking quarterly profit stat on their resume.
CommieBobDole 4y ago
And in Walmart's case, it's particularly egregious - the value proposition "Here's a website where you can buy anything that's sold at Walmart, for cheap-ass Walmart prices and we'll ship it to you, and you don't have to go into some crappy Walmart to do it" is appealing and seems like it would generate billions in revenue. But the reality is terrible; lots of stuff is 'in-store purchase only', some of it they won't ship but will only deliver from the local store for a fee, some of it is garbage only sold by third parties for wildly unpredictable prices. And the site is full of dark patterns to make it difficult to tell which is which until you try to check out. And on top of all that, which products are in which category change constantly. So you can try to re-order something that you got before, but now it's in-store only, or the price has gone up 50x and it's shipped by a 3rd party with a 6-8 week arrival time. For a while, I used Walmart.com to stock up on name-brand staples cheaply and conveniently, but it got to be such a pain in the ass that I went back to Costco.
- schemescape 4y ago
  I’ve never been a fan of Walmart, but I bought from them after getting frustrated by Amazon’s sea of questionable products. Even though I bought a new, “sold by Walmart” item (i.e. not from a marketplace seller), I received an unopened Amazon return that was shipped from an Amazon fulfillment center (complete with someone’s return slip that included their name and address).
- drewzero1 4y ago
  When I go to the website of a brick-and-mortar store chain I expect to see some kind of parity between the items listed online and those in store. A lot of stores do this very well-- Target springs to mind as a convenient example. Sure there are some online exclusives, but there's a lot more overlap and you can get a great idea of what you might find in store. Conversely when I've tried to shop on Walmart's site I feel like I'm looking at an Amazon/Aliexpress clone that happens to share a logo with Walmart.
ehPReth 4y ago
I really hope for a day, that will never come, where Amazon throws out its third party sellers.
short_sells_poo 4y ago
Are you seriously equating the ability to synthetize images and video to the invention of writing? I mean, one elevated us from hunter gatherer packs to a knowledge based society. The other means that we have to trust media less than before and will make it easier for people to generate art and custom porn. It's great, but I feel such breathless exaggeration will only hurt the effort in the long term, because it is taking on crypto currency like hype.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Mine is when marketplace sellers go "oh, sorry, we got your order but this is out of stock" or worse, "we mispriced it, it's actually $100 more we cancelled your order". Zero repercussions for staying a marketplace seller, no repercussions for the kind of behaviour the store itself would never accept.
wmeredith 4y ago
It's a race to get middlemen profits. The problem is without curation, the middlemen provide no value other than their brand name and reputation, but those also suffer because of the lack of curation. The short sightedness is real.
tcbawo 4y ago
This is one reason why I enjoy shopping at Costco: they stand by the products they sell. They tend to offer mid-range products with good value for the price. So far, I’ve been able to trust that they’re not going to sell me defective or misleading merchandise.
srcreigh 4y ago
I believe the long term bet is that retail winner(s) will use e-commerce search data to inform product development. It's a well known Amazon play and other retailers are trying to catch up. Other retailers will also sell ads on their sites which are additional revenue. Amazon proved this out being the 3rd highest ranking company in terms of advertising revenue behind Google and Meta/FB.
deepdriver 4y ago
I briefly shopped on Walmart.com because Amazon had marketized, destroying my trust in reviews, brands, and product quality, and Walmart had not. That time is past. Now I find myself sticking to manufacturer websites or buying things in the store again.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I kinda hate that I know this, but I suppose I might as well put my MBA to some use. There is such a concept as brand deposit ( where you are basically building up goodwill ) and brand withdrawal ( where you are using your brand for an activity that is likely to result in short term profit at a loss of goodwill of the customers ). For one reason or another, a whole slew of companies decided that short term profits are more important than their individual brands. It is puzzling for companies like Amazon, who partially rely on brand recognition.
xnx 4y ago
I don't know Crate & Barrel's situation, but this is a common pattern to extract money from a brand with a good reputation. Previously exhibited by every (formerly) US appliance brand and most local newspapers.

by kbos87 4y ago

adam_arthur 4y ago

I think the marketplace approach will prove less successful in the longer term. I can no longer trust any products or reviews on Amazon, for example, so I prefer not to shop there. Did they make some short term gains in profitability? Probably. Not sure it will be worth it in the end

madaxe_again 4y ago

Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency. There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.

pmezard 4y ago
Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Typically, yeah - it does mean that if you work long enough in the market you start seeing the repetition, and you can start to see individual design houses behind selections at brands, but quality is generally unimpeded as it’s a competitive market, and the economies of scale for both cost and quality achievable by an outsourced designer/manufacturer with low labour costs aren’t insignificant. Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.
- hattmall 4y ago
  Buying in bulk direct from manufacturers you typically get designs and then quality options. So you can essentially have the exact same product with a wide range of qualities. Things like material density, connector construction and all types of finishing touches from a variety of options. The manufacturer will have a huge assortment of stock products.
claudiulodro 4y ago
"ID houses" in this context is interior design, right? How does manufacturing work -- interior designers are typically not manufacturers? This is super interesting to me, so if you have any links or further info about this process, I'd love to know more.
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Industrial design. Whole point is that there’s usually complete vertical integration from conception to manufacturing to logistics, so they can crank out stuff that they can make without a headache with existing toolchains and ship it cheap.
  - claudiulodro 4y ago
    Ah that makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying.

samwillis 4y ago

What I find particularly annoying is that these online “marketplaces” are not curated - they literally sell anything, probably drop shipped. It used to be that you would shop at a branded store, and there was a level of expectation that they had curated their collection so that it was of a quality that matched the stores brand. Some of their wares may be under their own branding, but they would sell other bands too that they had explicitly decided to. You could trust them. By making everything an open marketplace it places the risk onto the customer. They are responsible for reading the reviews and deciding if they think the item will match their expectations. I hate it, being back the days of a store that would stand behind its wares as they had actually chosen to sell them!

heartbreak 4y ago
There is one notable exception. The third-party products sold on Apple’s online store are all vetted by Apple. Apple, of course, are masters at guarding their reputation.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  Costco does a pretty good job. I can purchase something there without research and still get a reasonable product at a reasonable price.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    Yeah, considering the scale, Costco is doing a wonderful job. Plus, their generous return and price adjustment policies, it’s a no brainer to just buy Costco.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  The difference is in scale. Compare and contrast the quality of Apple's online store for their physical goods with their app store.
- Philadelphia 4y ago
  By contrast, Apple has let their App Store become a scam marketplace

mcronce 4y ago

> I get it, Crate & Barrel sees this as an opportunity to monetize their brand without having to do all that much. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot less trust for a brand that used to represent a quality and reputation. It's essentially converting reputation to cash

nerdponx 4y ago
Is this the "It's my money, and I need it now" / "It's your money, use it when you need it!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg) of execs trying to cash out and bail before things go to shit? My question is, why is this happening now and why didn't it happen before? Is it because Amazon is simultaneously wildly popular and a total trash fire, so customers are becoming gradually inured to their bullshit and so other companies are thinking they can slip under the radar with this ploy? Was there an industry conference where this idea was presented and nobody ever explicitly agreed to collude, but there were nods all around the room and everyone knew what they were expected to do?
- solveit 4y ago
  Many of these are no longer viable businesses, so they do what any nonviable business does and gradually shut down, liquidating all their assets in the process which in this case happens to include the reputation they've built up when they used to be a viable business? So the answer to "why now?" would be, because they only recently began failing thanks to Amazon/COVID/insert your favourite recent civillisational change.
- lazide 4y ago
  Amazon is killing them and has been for a decade, and they’re trying to compete. Too late, and badly, as it turns out. You didn’t notice it as much earlier, because it wasn’t the high end ‘stuff you went there for’ that people stopped buying, it was all the other random things they bought when they went there to buy something, and the marginal customers. Now the core customer base is eroding, and they’re getting desperate.
wlesieutre 4y ago

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

I think it is SEO driving this. They want to surface product pages for as much stuff as possible so they contract with some third party to also be a reseller of such goods because it probably requires little overhead. And if it brings traffic then they can try to push their own "sponsored" products. I think it dilutes a brand. I don't know that Walmart has any worthwhile reputation as a brand though (at least in my eyes) to dilute so they're probably selling these things and don't care. When I search on local chain retailer websites, I try to use the "In Store" or "Same day pickup" filters to get actual products they sell. The nice thing is sometimes they indicate the inventory level.

shaftway 4y ago
It has some reputation as a brand. If I buy something from Walmart I generally don't expect it to be a quality product. It will fall apart very quickly and it'll probably have some unexpected issue with it. But I do expect that it won't be an *outright* scam.
- nucleardog 4y ago
  I'm at least fairly confident if I walk into Walmart and buy something it will be minimally fit for purpose and meet the legal requirements to be sold in my country. Meanwhile, you have no problem finding devices that should have FDA/Health Canada/FCC/IC approval and do not.

sp0rk 4y ago

I think this trend of trading in good will towards your brand for a quick buck has been growing powerfully over the last decade or so. It seems like a lot of brands (that make physical products, specifically) have decided to start making "economical versions" of their products that are far inferior to the ones that built up the brand's reputation. This wouldn't be an issue if they were labeled as such, but it seems like it's usually a tactic that's meant to trick you into buying something that you thought was higher quality.

m463 4y ago

I think in Amazon's case, it is slowly degrading into a flea-market type of experience. It's harder and harder to find the good products from decent brands, even with a direct search. Many times the decent brand product seems to be someone independent who is buying the product elsewhere and shipping it on amazon for a markup. Then there's the word-jumble brands for products - they all seem to be fly-by-night products that only seem to exist as long as the product entry has enough stars to get traction. sigh.

geodel 4y ago
Now this makes me happy. In sense it shows problem with breathless commentary on how Amazon can just take over front end and whole supply chain back end under its control without any possible challenge. I believe even without regulation (not that I disagree with regulating Amazon) once a critical mass of customer think its shady place to buy good quality stuff. It is downhill for Amazon from there.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Even if you shop for brands on Amazon you have the risk of getting a counterfeit. I was shopping for a particular weightlifting belt that is out of stock on the manufacturer's site. You can find them on Amazon but most likely they are not genuine.

user3939382 4y ago

My general theory is that by the time consumers catch on, the executives behind this have jumped ship to another company whose brand they can also mortgage for a nice-looking quarterly profit stat on their resume.

CommieBobDole 4y ago

And in Walmart's case, it's particularly egregious - the value proposition "Here's a website where you can buy anything that's sold at Walmart, for cheap-ass Walmart prices and we'll ship it to you, and you don't have to go into some crappy Walmart to do it" is appealing and seems like it would generate billions in revenue. But the reality is terrible; lots of stuff is 'in-store purchase only', some of it they won't ship but will only deliver from the local store for a fee, some of it is garbage only sold by third parties for wildly unpredictable prices. And the site is full of dark patterns to make it difficult to tell which is which until you try to check out. And on top of all that, which products are in which category change constantly. So you can try to re-order something that you got before, but now it's in-store only, or the price has gone up 50x and it's shipped by a 3rd party with a 6-8 week arrival time. For a while, I used Walmart.com to stock up on name-brand staples cheaply and conveniently, but it got to be such a pain in the ass that I went back to Costco.

schemescape 4y ago
I’ve never been a fan of Walmart, but I bought from them after getting frustrated by Amazon’s sea of questionable products. Even though I bought a new, “sold by Walmart” item (i.e. not from a marketplace seller), I received an unopened Amazon return that was shipped from an Amazon fulfillment center (complete with someone’s return slip that included their name and address).
drewzero1 4y ago
When I go to the website of a brick-and-mortar store chain I expect to see some kind of parity between the items listed online and those in store. A lot of stores do this very well-- Target springs to mind as a convenient example. Sure there are some online exclusives, but there's a lot more overlap and you can get a great idea of what you might find in store. Conversely when I've tried to shop on Walmart's site I feel like I'm looking at an Amazon/Aliexpress clone that happens to share a logo with Walmart.

ehPReth 4y ago

I really hope for a day, that will never come, where Amazon throws out its third party sellers.

short_sells_poo 4y ago

Are you seriously equating the ability to synthetize images and video to the invention of writing? I mean, one elevated us from hunter gatherer packs to a knowledge based society. The other means that we have to trust media less than before and will make it easier for people to generate art and custom porn. It's great, but I feel such breathless exaggeration will only hurt the effort in the long term, because it is taking on crypto currency like hype.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Mine is when marketplace sellers go "oh, sorry, we got your order but this is out of stock" or worse, "we mispriced it, it's actually $100 more we cancelled your order". Zero repercussions for staying a marketplace seller, no repercussions for the kind of behaviour the store itself would never accept.

wmeredith 4y ago

It's a race to get middlemen profits. The problem is without curation, the middlemen provide no value other than their brand name and reputation, but those also suffer because of the lack of curation. The short sightedness is real.

tcbawo 4y ago

This is one reason why I enjoy shopping at Costco: they stand by the products they sell. They tend to offer mid-range products with good value for the price. So far, I’ve been able to trust that they’re not going to sell me defective or misleading merchandise.

srcreigh 4y ago

I believe the long term bet is that retail winner(s) will use e-commerce search data to inform product development. It's a well known Amazon play and other retailers are trying to catch up. Other retailers will also sell ads on their sites which are additional revenue. Amazon proved this out being the 3rd highest ranking company in terms of advertising revenue behind Google and Meta/FB.

deepdriver 4y ago

I briefly shopped on Walmart.com because Amazon had marketized, destroying my trust in reviews, brands, and product quality, and Walmart had not. That time is past. Now I find myself sticking to manufacturer websites or buying things in the store again.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I kinda hate that I know this, but I suppose I might as well put my MBA to some use. There is such a concept as brand deposit ( where you are basically building up goodwill ) and brand withdrawal ( where you are using your brand for an activity that is likely to result in short term profit at a loss of goodwill of the customers ). For one reason or another, a whole slew of companies decided that short term profits are more important than their individual brands. It is puzzling for companies like Amazon, who partially rely on brand recognition.

xnx 4y ago

I don't know Crate & Barrel's situation, but this is a common pattern to extract money from a brand with a good reputation. Previously exhibited by every (formerly) US appliance brand and most local newspapers.