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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the "guilty of inflating prices" theme here. These stores are guilty of no crime. Prices fluctuate all the time, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly.

Bottom line, none of these products are essentials to life. The price is either worth it to you as a buyer, or not. Thinking you lost money because it's later available for less is the same sort of faulty logic used by people who think they are "saving" money by buying something on sale (when it's an item they wouldn't ordinarily buy). I had a friend who used to do that all the time. We'd be at a store, and he'd see something on sale that he had no intention of buying before he walked in. He'd buy it, and congratulate himself on "saving" money. I'd point out "no, you just spent $50 that you hadn't planned to spend." He just didn't see it that way.

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In Quebec, the CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT adequately protects consumers from such unfair practices :

225. No merchant, manufacturer or advertiser may, falsely, by any means whatever,

(a) invoke a price reduction;

(b) indicate a regular price or another reference price for goods or services;

[...]

231. No merchant, manufacturer or advertiser may, by any means whatever, advertise goods or services of which he has an insufficient quantity to meet public demand unless mention is made in his advertisement that only a limited quantity of the goods or services is available and such quantity is indicated.

The merchant, manufacturer or advertiser who establishes to the satisfaction of the court that he had reasonable cause to believe that he could meet public demand or who offered the consumer, for the same price, other goods of the same nature and of an equal or greater cost price is not guilty of any infraction of this section.

I feel that the United States are a bit reluctant to protect their citizens.

I believe the US has protections against deceptive pricing like that too, but i don't think any of these companies or practices described in the article would be in violation of it.

The law you're referencing is a protection against raising the price before a sale so you can advertise the sale price as x% off the inflated price instead of the store's regular price. Most e-shopping sites advertise a discount relative to MSRP, not relative to any price they've previously charged, which leaves them free to raise or lower the prices as they want.

I'm fairly certain that established case law requires the retailer to have actually offered the item at the listed reference price for a reasonable amount of time before the sale. Using the (usually inflated) MSRP as reference is in contravention of art. 225.

buyer beware; its not protection that the US is averse to, its interference

This is absolutely true and this study supports your perspective. Guilty is maybe too strong a word, but there is a hint of false advertising. The point of this study was to see how factual the "sales" were that are advertised on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday. We're at a point where people expect to spend their money that those specific days to capitalize on supposedly great deals. I found it interesting to tangibly demonstrate that not only are many of the deals negligible, but that many of the prices were inflated.

The word guilty does not require a crime. According to google "define guilty": culpable of or responsible for a specified wrongdoing

Further it's not "price fluctuation". It's a systemic raising of prices prior to a "sale" event, to deceive people into thinking they paid less than they would have by not waiting for the sale.

As for the person you are talking about may be acting irrationally, but there are many people who rationally wait for something they want to be on sale - because such a thing should save them some money. These people are maybe being naive - but without easy access to perfect market information, they have to rely on some sort of price messaging.

Finally - articles like this are good for people who shop to get better informed. Even if I were to track the price of something, to know that it used to be cheaper, I have no way of knowing if a given "sale" is a good price since future prices are unpredictable. However if I know of the "price inflation before sale" practice, with data to back it up, I can infer a pattern suggesting whether I should wait longer or not on a purchase.

Thanks for the support! I agree especially that it's not just random price fluctuation, specifically with the Apple TV example listed in the article. Target dropped the price and then systematically kept it at an inflated rate before dropping it partially again. This was not a case of hourly fluctuations according to demand.

Generally I completely agree with you. However the conversation changes when you're talking about price inflation with relation to sales. Yes, prices change all the time. That's fine. However, if the price inflates every time it's "on sale" that's different and is possibly in violation of various regulations or laws.

This is the sort of thing I wish that schools taught in "home economics" -- e.g. that sales are often not real bargains, to make buying decisions on the basis of value not strictly "discounts" that are available, the true cost of credit card debt, etc. Instead we learned how to make peanut butter cookies and sew on buttons.

You're absolutely right. This is the result of effective marketing. We're told "buy on these days, you'll get the best value" while the exact opposite is true, yet very few seem to take the time to work it out.

However I do still believe some level on consumer protection is necessary. I do not think we ought to let the less-savvy be taken advantage simply because someone is smarter than them. Where to draw that line? That's always in flux.

Very much agreed. And this was very much the case on specific days. Prices do fluctuate, but there were definitely products that were continuously inflated over the course of multiple days.

> Prices fluctuate all the time, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly.

Right, the problem comes when the stores inflate prices artificially just before a sale event so that they can display a bigger discount percent on the day of the sale. This in turn makes the consumers think they're getting a better deal than they're actually getting, it's also a bigger incentive for them to spend their money.

The problem is that it's a fake incentive. While this is not a crime it's certainly deceptive and shady.

Part of their shadiness is also elevating prices on days that are dedicated to being major "sales" so as to jump on that bandwagon.

Ok, we changed that phrase to a more neutral one in the title.

The fascinating thing about this study is that in certain cases, prices went beyond traditional fluctuations to the point of being inflated for multiple days in a row irrespective of time of day and demand.

> I had a friend who used to do that all the time. We'd be at a store, and he'd see something on sale that he had no intention of buying before he walked in. He'd buy it, and congratulate himself on "saving" money. I'd point out "no, you just spent $50 that you hadn't planned to spend." He just didn't see it that way.

Your reaction to this is to just be okay with entities profiting from the delusion of your friend?

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