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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

Brick-and-mortar stores sometimes use similar tactics. I recall reports of Media Markt and Saturn (two German electronics store chains) selling household appliances (washing machines, refrigerators, etc.) under changed model numbers. Still with the same brand name (because brand recognition is important), but with a different model number so that you cannot find the same model for a lower price somewhere else.

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They do this a lot, they ask manufacturers to create custom versions. With computers or laptops it could be a unique configuration, a combination of harddisk size and memory not sold elsewhere.

This way the store can give you a "lowest price guarantee". Find it lower priced elsewhere, and we will pay you the difference!

Easy to give such a guarantee if you're 100% sure no other store sells the exact model.

This also happens in the UK, except that many of the stores themselves are owned by the same conglomerate.

Also easy to offer a lowest price guarantee when you know that customers are likely to only shop around at the high street 'competitors' which you also own. Will they bother to shop around? Doesn't really matter - heads you win, tails you win.

Although this probably works less well with much of the demographic of people who buy computers in the online shopping age.

Norway too

The different model number may indicate a store specific version of that model. There is an appliance company I'm familiar with that has a reputation for low quality products even though they sell the same brands as everyone else. Sure enough, the model numbers of the versions they sell are slightly different to everyone else.

On a similar note, when buying a scooter for my daughter, I found the "same" scooter in Toys-R-Us and Walmart. Despite identical branding and packaging, the Walmart version was of noticeably poorer quality (different materials and so on). I didn't check model numbers / SKUs, but I would expect them to be different.

Different consumers care about different things.

I worked at a retailer who would position certain brands as junk (and they were). The junk label would be used to upsell to a better product or sell a high margin extended warranty. The pricing was usually engineered to make the warranty marginally cheaper.

We see the same thing in the US for matresses, appliances, and especially electronics like TVs. Even well known large brands will be sold with long, and different, model numbers.

The B&Ms know that people are comparison shopping, even as they browse the store: they'll be on their phones looking up model numbers to compare to online and at nearby stores. As we all know, a moat is preferable to competition, even if you have the same or inferior product.

IKEA rebrands appliances in the US. However, I consider this a value add because IKEA has an excellent warranty policy. Sometimes rebranding makes sense when you have some sort of value to add to ownership.

Not only can you not price match those situations but often times they get advertised as "exclusive" and maybe have one small feature change to warrant it.

Dixons Group are notorious for this in the UK.

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