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 simply uncorrelated.

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.

Pretty sure that is illegal in the UK. If a business is advertising a sale, they have to follow certain regulations, which include actually having discounts against a previous price which was in place for a period of time.

It's not without perverse effects though. Often you see price increases in October/November so that a discount can be advertised in December, but it's just the same as or barely-discounted from the September price.

In Washington state there's an administrative code that says retail stores are only allowed to have a 'closing down'/'going out of business' sale "once per calendar year".

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.

yep. That's not a very good sale :) One of them was trying to sell a truck with 1000 with of nitrogen in tires apparently. But I bet the sale would knock 500 off that.

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.

That's interesting. I once wrote to a coffee company because online they were selling their big bags of beans at more per ounce than the small bags. The co-owner wrote back and explained that the smaller bags were in way more third party stores than the big bags so they had to delay the price increase on those (I think to give the store network more notice so one store wasn't undercutting another). Needless to say I ordered a bunch of cheaper smaller bags to stock up ahead of the price bump. Anyway no idea if that's what was going on at Fred Meyer but I suppose it's possible the lentil supply chain is equally complex.

Yeah, this is a trick that retailers have been playing for a long time. Same with buying from those bulk bins. Much of the time, the bulk bin goods are the same price as the packaged versions. Sometimes, they're more expensive. Numerous times, I've seen store employees filling the bins by opening retail packages and emptying them in.

You can trust nothing in grocery stores.

It's not a "trick" -- it's a consequence of dynamic pricing and how efficient supply chains are now.

You're effectively running volume arbitrage to even out inefficiencies in seller's upstream suppliers.

Or, to put it another way, the seller's profits (margin*volume) can often be the same on smaller package (even for cheaper per weight unit) as larger package (for more expensive per weight unit).

I once ate at a restaurant where the dessert card priced two scoops of ice cream at significantly more than twice one scoop.

They weren't impressed when I put in two orders of a single scoop....

Freddie's is weird with their pricing.

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.

The same issue was happening with my local service station. The 16.9 ounce bottle was $1.60 and the 24 ounce bottle was $2.50.

I find the 3 and 4 liter bottles of water are the same price at most gas stations. Of course the 3 liter bottles are on display where they are easy to find, while the 4 liter is hidden where only the price sensitive will find them. (4 liters is also one us gallon, and one you have a container you find one gallon refills vending machines that a very cheap, and those vending machines probably have better water)

Stores do this with shop towels too and it's aggravating. Why can't I buy bulk shop towels for less?!

Because they earn more money if they don't charge less! :-)

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.

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 ;)

They're not half-size, though, they're actually a bit _more_ than 50%. So that means you'll go through them faster than if you purchase full-sized ones and get in the habit of tearing a full sheet in half and setting the unneeded half aside.

I only want that until someone figures it out and starts making 1/100 size sheets, or some other cheat.

I have the same issue with rice, they always put the price per kg, never per grain..

weight is better for rice since individual grains will vary with size and width.

That's the point, I would only take the biggests.

I just rip off the size of paper towel I need every time I use them.

All of my grocery shopping is done on my supermarkets website and sorting by unit price brings up the price per pound or ounce or whatever that products unit of measure is. For paper towels it returns $ per square foot, so even if the product size is different the price per unit of measure stays the same and makes it easier to comparison shop.

It's the same for toilet paper. We really need sane regulations on packaging to make it easier for consumers.

Sometimes (at least in the UK) that number is wrong, possibly intentionally. The only really sure way is to do the calculation yourself. Unless the weight is wrong too.

Another UK trick, promotional prices can skip showing the unit price. Tesco has turned half their prices into promotional prices. Either as multibuys or just by requiring their loyalty card to get a not insane price.

I've never noticed a wrong per-price before. How wrong and what kind of wrong?

I remember shopping for kitchen roll once, one product had a per-price that was per 100 sheets, the other per roll. Impossible to decipher!

Occasionally, so wrong I actually notice. Which must be pretty wrong, because my mental arithmetic is not great.

There's also a thing they'll do where two similar products in jars/tins will have a £/kg number but one will be based on the total weight (e.g. including pickling liquid) and the other based on the weight of the actual food.

Which is fine if the prices are given per 1 kg or 100 g. Here in the US they have the prices by the ounce or by the pound, by the gallon, quart, or liquid ounce ... not exactly transparent unless you can >> 4 in your head faster than / 10. I can't.

I usually find the numbers are (purposefully?) ridiculous.

if you compare products, one might say "3.24 per EACH" and another might say "0.04 per oz" or some other nonsense.

This is mandatory in Germany (probably EU)

Costco is pretty good about their sale prices being lower than most times.

Came here to say this. At this point I consider it part of Costco’s brand that I can trust I’m getting close to the lowest possible price for a product when I buy from them. Sure Costco still has it’s own deals and sales pop up on a cadence (for example, never buy tires off-sale because they run the tire sale basically ever 6 weeks, the Traeger event happens something like quarterly, etc.), but overall they’re trustworthy. It’s a huge part of the buying experience with Costco and it generates loyalty over time.

Agree with lotsofpulp about the sales being valid.

I have found that Costco prices are not always the lowest, but that still doesn't always mean they're a bad deal. While in an ideal world, anywhere you can pick up a Brand X product Y, it should be the same, that's not actually the case anymore. (I presume Wal-Mart didn't create this reality, but they have had a disproportional role in propagating it.) Of all things, I notice that the canned black olives I buy at Costco are consistently a step up from the exact same brand at my local megamart. So even though they aren't actually that much cheaper I still prefer to buy them there.

I also find that sometimes a product seems to be comparable, but isn't.

There was a grill at costco I was interested in and it seemed to be about the same price at home depot.

But looking further it turns out the costco model also included a grill cover and a thermometer.

I also assumed Costco’s longer warranty meant that products bought from there would be made at least a little bit better.

It is a shame the 4 year appliance warranty is gone. Used to be such a no brainer to buy appliances at Costco.

Sale prices in EU now require (kinda, there are either exceptions, or many non compliant sites and stores) to show some comparison price.

Here is a page from Amazon explaining it: https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/gp/help/customer/display.html...

I tend to use CamelCamelCamel to find out if I'm getting an actual deal on something, at least when shopping online.

the best addon is Keepa, they have a time series price tracking thats added right in the page

Slickdeals.net also good. Owned, iirc, by some bank though. Comments seem genuine and let you know if it’s a real deal or shill post.

I use Slickdeals all the time. It's pretty great, but has had a lot more advertising both blatant and stealth in recent years. Still good site though, I'd also like to know any more deals sites though.

And I also wonder how is there not a legitimate coupons site? Or is there? Even slickdeals now the coupon codes section is trach similar to retailmenot and the multitude of other crappy coupon spam sites.

Slickdeals used to be a good source for legit coupon codes and sometimes they are still on there but you have to dig in the forums the actual "coupons" section of the site is spam.

On a slightly more than cursory inspection. That site sucks.

My favorite tactic is "50% off!" with an asterisk next to it, but no corresponding footnoted asterisk explaining the asterisk itself.

Another favorite of mine is "up to X% off". Of course, "up to" includes "0%".

Even funnier is "save up to X% or more!" as if "up to" doesn't mean "no more than".

was part of a company that was putting out mass market tv/radio ads. i was in a group that got some previews and we were asked for feedback. "Save up to 30%" and "save up to 40%" were phrases thrown around. I mentioned that our average customer was actually saving closer to 50% (often more), and asked why we didn't just say that. Head of marketing guy said those numbers were generally not believed by most viewers. I was only there a few months at that time - they'd been running variations for years, and had some numbers to back that up (website clicks, call volume, etc). We could have said "up to 45% or more!" which... is technically 'true', but confusing and awkward to anyone who parses the whole thing. And "save up to 53%!" just didn't come across as believable, even when we had the data to show it.

Manufacturers and retailers will also change models for sales. Black Friday sales are sometimes cheaper, lower quality versions. Discount clothing retailers sometimes get items made specifically for them. And that's ignoring bad QA. Patagonia just filed a lawsuit against Nordstrom Rack for selling counterfeit clothing.

Yup. A lot of the consumer protection regulations are being totally ignored with impunity. It’s nice to see one retailer held to account. But I don’t think it foretells a larger trend.

These days you need to be very aware of what a fair price is for any given thing and then shop around to find the best deal based on that understanding. Totally ignore %-off, initial prices. Just look for the deal based on what you know a fair price to be.

I think a lot of online stores can get away with this sort of thing because they use “airline” pricing. Everyone sees a different price based on the store’s heuristics, thus there is no “one” price aside from MSRP. and so they can claim a discount off that.

> Yup. A lot of the consumer protection regulations are being totally ignored with impunity. It’s nice to see one retailer held to account. But I don’t think it foretells a larger trend.

I'm Australian. I saw the headline, and my first thought was "I wonder if this is some US retailer playing fast a loose with the truth in Australia". And yup, it was.

Australia is not the USA. You don't ignore consumer laws in Australia with impunity like you can in the USA.

The best example I've seen was HP not honouring their warranties on laptops. The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - a government agency) forced hp.com to put a 1/2 page banner at the top of every web page saying they didn't honour warranties, and spelling out the details of what they did. It was in your face, it was ugly, and it was startling sight for any hp.com visitor.

I've only saw this happen twice. The other time was a local retailer called kogan.com. That's probably because that demonstration of what the government will do to companies that don't comply with the law (I'm sure it hurt more than any fine) there is now near 100% compliance with what the companies doing business in Australia say they will do on their web site, and what they actually do.

Another classic example is Australian ISP's are forced to advertise what your minimum download speed at peak hour will be. And it's enforced. Can you believe that? There is a place in the world where download speeds are what they say on the box, and "unlimited downloads" really means "download as much as you like".

Australia is a living demonstration that you don't have to live in a post-truth society. It is possible to pass laws to say you have to spell out in straightforward, non-misleading terms on the box what is in the box. And it's possible to enforce them in imaginative ways that remarkably effective, yet don't involve fines so you don't get companies evaluating the tradeoff of paying the fine versus lying and keeping the loot. And yes, the end result makes life simpler fairer for everyone - including the retailers.

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.

Yea, and some mark up prices on specific days of the week so they can have regular sales when people are actually shopping.

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 once bought three different three-for-two offers in the UK, expecting to get the 3rd, 6th & 9th most expensive items free, but I was actually charged for all but the 7th-9th, which would have cost me a lot more

(I got the price I expected in the end, by making three separate purchases)

I also saw a competing chain labelling food nearing its use-by date with a higher price than otherwise identical items with longer to go, but presumably that was a genuine error

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.

Yeah. I was going to point out https://camelcamelcamel.com which I've used religiously for years to gauge prices. Or https://isthereanydeal.com for video game prices (which thankfully don't spike that often but helps for assessing how deep a sale is).

Consumer empowerment is so wonderful. I was thinking yesterday about what a mystery it is that an auction site like ebay functions, that people would use it at all, without a tool to help them do silent auctioning/last minute bidding.

Would absolutely love for distributed layers to share & syndicate price and many other indicators to the world.

I love when publix doubles the price of an item and puts it on bogo to seem like it's on sale. Y'all aint fooling anyone

In my experience, they don't do this. I'm a very regular person, in that I buy the same things for long stretches until I get tired of them, so I know what the long term prices of things are. I always stock up on bogos at Publix, since they have always been true bogos. I've never seen them inflate the price just to bogo it. In fact, I don't recall Publix ever playing price shenanigans. They are one of the most honest companies I know of when it comes to being fair to the consumer.

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.

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 the store owners will compensate by setting their target shipping price in whatever manner they can and then making the target item price whatever it needs to be to work out. For the particular things I'm shopping for (semi-obscure CDs), $30 is a reasonable price with shipping, so I bought without complaining, because the "shipping price" isn't really relevant to me, only the final price I pay.

For a while you could kind of run some scams where you the store aggregation sites would show you as the cheapest because your price was $1 and the sort order would ignore your $25 shipping fee, sorting you in front of the shop selling for $5 and $5 shipping, but all the aggregators I've seen lately have switched to sorting by price + shipping so that doesn't work anymore.

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.

I kind of hate free shipping, tbh. It heavily favors sellers with massive distribution systems.

Without it, a nearby distributor might look like a more compelling option than the giant monolithic (and near monopolistic) online retailer.

That $1.50 bag of chips still cost the store 50 cents.

Red Bull cost pennies per gallon.

You see… the pricing of goods is arbitrary, as in mutable given human philosophical whims, not coupled to the movement of the universe otherwise, we’ve hallucinated an entire cottage industry around social sharing but only so long as everyone is socially sharing the right people are rich.

Our culture is itself something an AI might hallucinate.

Why everyone knows Martha Stewart has always been X rich so we will inflate the money supply with those immutable truths in mind and oops now thanks to her investment help she’s richer and everyone else without an investment team is poorer. Should have capitalized harder.

> 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 $3500. It’s a big scam.

Dell also sends “itemized” invoices where every item is listed, but the price is one big total. Descriptions are intentionally, in my opinion, obfuscated to resist price comparing and auditing. We need a massive audit of government spending on tech IMO. Companies like Dell are price gouging.

> 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.

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 stores like JC Penny, Sears, Macy's, etc do the same thing where every week there are "sales". They all play on the psychology of the word "sale".

> Why is Dell being singled out?

Why not? Someone is going to be singled out. You can't really go after everyone simultaneously.

This reminds me of a story I heard of a guy who was speeding, but going the same speed as everyone else. He got stopped and as the cop was writing the ticket, he said "why are you singling me out, when everyone else was speeding too?"

The cop said "I can't stop everyone. You just drew the short straw this time."

No, this isn't standard operationg procedure in countries with laws against this very thing, such as Australia, which the article is about.

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.

Why the hell are you worried about dell being singled out instead of thinking "At least one of these bastards is being held accountable!" Everyone one of them should pay, but I'm glad that today it's Dell.

Why the hell can't all of them be held accountable? Seriously, why are they only able to hold one company accountable? What are their limitations? What were their criteria to single out the one company? The SEC just charged multiple crypto companies that everyone knew charges were coming. They were able to avoid the "why just one" by not charging just one.

Seriously, why the hell?

I'm always baffled by this argument. So because two people do a bad thing neither can be held accountable because each can just point at the other and dylan604 will say one is being singled out?

Or, you know, you could take the question in the spirit it was asked. Because dylan604 knows there are other offenders, and I'm not even in the business of policing these issues. So, it's only logical to extrapolate that out to expect that those actually responsible for policing these issues would know about them as well. So why not bring up charges on all of them? Is it honestly because the team involved is so small and they have no multitasking abilities so they can only work on one case at a time? Is it because of all of the people they've approached, they've all made amends and changed their ways so that they are only charging those that held out?

There are many ways "why just one" type of questions can be answered, and the "because 2" responses are tired.

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

When my wife worked for Dell, she got a 17% employee discount on all Dell branded products on their website. But it was 17% off list price, not current "sale" price. So using your employee discount often would cause you pay more for the product than if you didn't use it.

This has been my experience with nearly every "discount" program. You always pay more because it's anchored to some other price.

My son's 10% employee discount at Target seems to work as you'd expect, as it stacks with any other discounts and sales on an item, including the 5% loyalty card discount they offer. The only real limitations are on certain heavily in demand items, and there's a per item limit so you cannot run a discount Target eBay store.

Sounds like hotel bookings. So many “hurry up, 246 people booked this exact room in the past 14 seconds”

Yup. Remote small roadside motel in Nowhere, Wyoming, for a single night in May of 2024.

"19 people have looked at this room today, book now!"

Think Lenovo does the same.

And for some reason some tech journalists don't account for it. "Ah, but this Thinkpad has an MSRP of $4,395, so it's much more expensive than the competition" when approximately nobody would purchase it for that price, and the consistently-on-sale price would be right in line with competitors.

I'm rather glad that journalists don't take that into account. Comparing MSRPs is fair. Perhaps it provides some pressure discouraging companies from engaging in that sort of shenanigans.

Not sure that's on reviewers. Lenovo is using anti consumer tactics to improve sales (the elevated MSRP with a constant "sale"), should they be praised?

Seems fair game to use fake MSRPs against them.

> It's tempting to jump on sales that are presented as steals. But when it comes to online shopping, you can't trust every sale price (or review, or seller) you see.

Surely this isn't limited to online shopping. In the days of yore, when I sold PCs at Circuit City, my store would put together package deals where you bought a PC, monitor, printer, etc. The prices for the package deals were the same as if you bought everything together, but we'd put it all on one tag, at a single price, and also show the total you could get in mail-in rebates from the whole package. Because it was advertised as a package, people assumed it was cheaper, oftentimes.

When the bacon cheeseburger is on sale, it can be cheaper to buy it and ask them to hold the bacon than to just buy the cheeseburger.

McDonald's was notorious for that. The Cheeseburger/Double Cheeseburger was often cheaper or included in deals&promos, while the Hamburger/Double Hamburger wasn't.

I was challenged once as to "why don't you just buy the hamburger if you want to hold the cheese", I asked them to ring it with the hamburger and it came to a higher total, so I asked to ring it as I originally asked instead.

> and also show the total you could get in mail-in rebates from the whole package

That's a very sleazy thing that I'm glad I don't see nearly as much anymore. I still avoid shopping at places that I've seen do this in the past.

The main difference is you were just showing the price and the rebates and letting people assume it was cheaper. Dell was giving a false price for the monitors and actively telling consumers that there was a discount.

Going out of business! Everything must go!

It's not limited in any way for any thing that can be sold.

I grew up near a store that had been going out of business for over 20 years.

Was that "Value City Furniture's Third Annual Going Out of Business Sale"? I remember those from my childhood, though I understand that one of those finally stuck.

I'm not familiar with that. No, this was a mom & pop furniture store.

I've been shopping Dell.com for 23 years. They've been doing fake discount for 23 years. Price delta isn't as big as it used to be, but they make it hard to do comparison shopping even within their own site.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/sr/desktop...

For other people in developing countries: Isn't it weird to see news about a massive outrage for practices that in our place are totally common?

Where I'm from, this happens all the time. And the law permits them to just change the price at whim. So they can just raise the price of any product and slap a "discount" label on them, even if the new "discounted" price is higher than the previous one.

Funny thing in Argentina. With current inflation numbers, usually discounts mean just keeping last week’s prices.

In Tunisia, North Africa we have laws against that. It works even in third world, because those bad practices do not benefit the business, they really need to get rid of inventory sometimes and they need to do it in a safe trusted way.

Secret Lab Chairs still get away with listing totally imaginary “Non-Direct Pricing” despite the ASA saying- and I quote- “we think it likely to have breached the Advertising Codes (“the Codes”) that we administer.” And their 5-year warranty extension obliges you to become part of a social media Astro-turfing program- https://secretlab.co.uk/pages/redeem

Most regulatory bodies in the UK exist to say they exist, as a marketing exercise. Understaffed, underfunded etc

Probably the same in many other countries.

If I am buying anything, on sale or otherwise, I do my best to look up historical prices. It's gotten to be a pain in the ass to be a consumer. I feel like we used to have consumer protections, but not any more.

That's why the UE law that requires the shops to display the lowest price over last 30 days is pretty useful

Eu directive 2019/2161, which regulates this, was supposed to be in effect since 28.5.2022, but I see nothing on local retailers webpages, nor in physical stores ):

It seems that in France around 96% of the advertised price do not comply with this directive. We need more fines.

https://www.nextinpact.com/lebrief/71805/ufc-que-choisir-por...

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.

Why is a carrot grown on May 1 not different from a carrot grown on May 2?

This is pathetic, but their U/UP line of monitors is really good. In fact I'm using them for the last 10 years or so. Back in the day, Dell was one of very few manufacturers who offered monitors with 16:10 screens, which are are far better at 24" size than 16:9. (The difference is not that noticeable with 27"+ screens and bigger)

Most Dell equipment is marked up far in excess of 200% as they are happy to sell to large customers for 50% of retail pricing.

The classic mark it up and big discount trick

This is closer to "This monitor is $500, but since you're a good customer and I like you, I'll give it to you for $800"

Dealing with them on an institutional basis is bad too. Use to be I’d email our sales rep with a configuration and request for a quote. Usually a week later they’d come back with a price that would be substantially lower vs the website listed price. Now they have us use the Dell premier site where Dell says that the prices are already discounted and ready to go. For the most part the premiere pricing is the same as the normal website.

This is rampant and goes well beyond Dell. Take the Black Friday "deals", particularly on TVs. Retailers are known to slowly rise prices leading up to Black Friday to be able to advertise a steep "discount" (which honestly isn't that steep).

It's honestly exhausting as a consumer dealing with all these tricks.

This also coincides with 'SKU explosion'. Back in the day before digital inventory manufactures generally minimized the numbers of SKUs they had because it was a nightmare managing thousands of different products. Circuit City, Best Buy, and whoever else was around at the time would pretty likely have the same TV.

But now each one will have a different SKU number even if they are the exact same product so you cannot easily price match. Coming back a few weeks later to the same store and even then products might have new SKUs. It's just hell keeping up with what features do or don't work on these devices when they are constantly in flux.

Lenovo has entered the chat.

This is everything in the Lenovo online store. I signed up for a business account and called a rep on the phone and got a quote for a single machine and the rep gave me a discount of 15% and then when I went on the website the exact same machine was 35% off (and is perpetually on sale for that discounted amount).

This is the least of Lenovo's issues. They're fine with shipping computers that have malware and backdoors, sometimes in exchange for money. I don't know how much more clearly they can communicate to people that they shouldn't be trusted.

I 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.

This is frequently a way to soften the impact of inflation. The trick I've been watching my grocery store use the last two years is a product will get a "clearance" tag on it with the price marked down 20 to 30 cents. They let the current stock sell out (or simply not restock the shelf) so it sits empty for a week. Then the same item reappears marked up 50 cents from the previous regular price. Occasionally there'll be different packaging so it appears more like a "new" product. But a few times I was able to compare the old with the new and it's always been the exact same thing.

Fuck 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

Is it me, or does it seem like oriental rug shops are constantly having “going out of business sales?”

They also have the most ridiculous markups I've ever seen. We went rug shopping and my wife found a rug she liked. Price tag? $35,000! The salesman "liked us so much" he was willing to drop it to $10,000. I asked him a question he had to go look up, and when he did I snapped a picture of the label, before telling him we had to think about it overnight. Found the exact same rug online for $500 delivered, and that is what now sits in our living room.

We were going out of business, but the sale was so successful we're doing ok now!

It's strange that "sales" claims are relevant at all. Rationally, you should make your decision based on whether the product is worth the price, not based on what the price is at other times and for other people.

You're right, and the obvious conclusion is that people are not rational. Next, then, it's strange that many others expect this from them. It's denying an integral part of human experience.

I do get what you mean though. People need to look after themselves, because when they are not caring about something, others do, and many make their living out of this.

Yep. This is why I ignore sales and other promotional pricing.

Related: "we're experiencing longer than normal hold times" on phone calls with businesses. They say that so often that hmmmm, I wonder whether hold times are normally longer than normal.

I haven’t seen that in practice much, but in time I expect to see it displayed more and more.

Doesn’t mean no one will lie, or find ways around it, especially less scrupulous retailers.

For example by raising the price 31 days out from a sale.

Dell has always sold expensive goods in my experience. They've never been my first choice when being thrifty.

That's a different issue.

If we assume honest dealing, when you see a $1000 display going for $500, you would think you get a high-end product at a mid-range price. You may then inquire why it's on sale - is it used, is it older generation, does the shop need shelf space? Who knows.

What should not be happening is that a product that has never sold for $1000 is presented as being worth $1000.

If you want free market to work, then deceit needs to be punished really harshly.

I may be naive, but I've only used the _current_ price of something to evaluate whether I'd be willing to pay this right now, disregarding any previous or future pricing. This way it hasn't mattered whether a sofa was claimed to be "worth" $500 or $5k and I can justify it in the future to myself that I deemed something worth what was asked at the time

There are genuine differences between high-end and mid-range products, which are never fully covered by technical specs. If you're lucky, you can watch three or four youtube videos and get a general impression; but you can't do that for every product, so you need to make a shortlist first. Pricing is a useful signal for that.

Then there are mid-range products sold at a high price, of course, but you almost never see high-end products sold at mid-range prices.

> Pricing is a useful signal for that.

I disagree. Pricing is a very poor signal for that, depending on the sort of good.

Pricing tells you what the target demographic of the store is. It doesn't reliably tell you much about quality.

> but you almost never see high-end products sold at mid-range prices.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "high end", but in my experience, there isn't usually a great deal of difference in quality between high priced and mid priced goods.

The large and consistent difference between the two is in presentation and aesthetic design. If those are important to you, fair enough. But I don't consider either of those to be quality issues.

> If you want free market to work, then deceit needs to be punished really harshly.

But as we've seen, in a free market this deceit is rewarded, not punished. And if you try to intervene with government punishment, then it's not a free market. In other words, a truly "free market" doesn't work (in the sense that you meant when you said "work").

if you want the free market to work, consumers can’t use price to evaluate quality

This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem and too abridged.

It is like arguing that for free speech to work everybody has to write newspaper articles or that you personally need to be a programmer for opensource to be useful. These can be different people and for a free market (/free(dom) speech/free(dom) software) to work you need a sufficient number of qualified people.

So I wouldn't blame the consumers (btw this term always sounds like slur to me as compared to customers) for using price as a proxy. You can't expect them to get loaners, purchase testing equipment etc.. That should be tech journalists' job and then consumers can make an educated decision, which in turn ensures that price indeed is a good proxy.

Hence, blame the sorry state of tech reviews in the American market. What even are the reasonably good sites still left? I know of wirecutter (mixed), rtings, tftcentral and maybe prad.de. What are consumers supposed to base their evaluations on in your opinion?

> So I wouldn't blame the consumers (btw this term always sounds like slur to me as compared to customers)

Agree. I try to avoid using the term "consumer" except maybe when it's talking about actually consuming things (such as food and drink).

Price is even more easily gamed than reviews, i don’t care how bad reviews get, pricing will always be a terrible signal

Everyone can't do it all the time.

Ideally it's like stock pricing where some people put in their knowledge and other people can get a reasonably accurate price most of the time.

We have price as a proxy precisely because consumers can't accurately evaluate the quality of all goods, especially in an age where spectacle marketing dominates.

I disagree. When I was a kid I always bought Dell for my desktop computers because you could get the same specs for $300-$400 less than other providers (HP, Compaq, etc). My Mom would give me a $600 budget and I would do hours of research finding the most power I could get for my money. Dell pretty much always came out on top.

I'm not sure what time period you are referring to. In the UK in the 90s you would call up Dell and talk to them about pricing and specs after seeing an ad like those on https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-dell-computers.

The customer service experience at the time was great compared to what you'd typically deal with in the UK. I was the person buying computers for my parents' business, my parents' friends, and some of my friends, all through my parent's business . The reps were probably a little confused because they had repeat orders from the same "customer", but knew they were also dealing with a teenager that had done their research. This yielded some fun conversations and I always felt that they wanted to be competitive with their pricing.

Unfortunately, this all changed towards the end of the 90s as PC manufacturers cut costs, moved to the web, and outsourced.

2005-2010 for me

+1 on this. For a while Dell had a nice sweet spot. It was cheaper than the aforementioned brands, roughly equal price wise to the likes of Gateway but much more configurable and better customer service, and only a bit more expensive than unknown to me brands back than found in computer shopper. Only way to do better in same budget was to build your own

I recall Dell being early to having a good online store. In fact I think you could only buy Dell computers online at first?

Like any business, success and growth changed their motiviations.