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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately some of this (bloating the price just before a sale to cover the cost, note: e.g. day before) is illegal where I live. Though it doesn't stop shops from trying. It does give the customer some extra power. If for instance the shop fails to sell all stock and dumps it afterwards you can try to claim the difference as this falls under deceptive practices.

The buy one get two variant is fine as long as there is actual profit to the customer and no shady 'you still pay the same but it looks different' offers.

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Same in France. So when sales time arrives, you can see some items prices rising up a week before (which is, de facto, legal as long as you do it in advance)

True in some forms (in the Netherlands) but if you only sell it for a day for the increased price you could argue it is deceptive (Mediamarkt does this usually for a week before the sales which is apparently enough). What they used to do, raise the price on the day of the sale, is fortunately no longer allowed. The other trick being the use of the advised selling price (which is always way more than the actual value of the product) and go from there.

What I usually see these days is that products get offered on sale which have not been sold before so there is no way of knowing if they offered it before for less. Though internet helps if you are in a shop and it sounds dodgy at best.

The rules are slightly more complicated.

You are only allowed to discount items already in stock a month before the start date[0] That's why the back of the shop is fully loaded by boxes a month before the sales period starts.

The rules seem silly because it's an open secret, all companies jack up the price and stock up just before... but you'd be hard pressed to find actual proof:

"I ordered 50k items to the supplier just 30 days before, I meant to buy only 50, fat finger mistake, so we had to discount them".

"Yes, the reference price is based on the highest price we had on record among our 500 stores. Yes, I know it was more than twice the median price, fat finger mistake but hey, who does not make mistakes, 14€99 is too similar to 5€50..."

[0]https://www.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/vos...

It also happens in online marketplaces like Amazon but luckily there are tools to track price changes like https://camelcamelcamel.com/ (disclaimer: not affiliated at all, just a happy user). Wish there were more tools like that but for retail.

I love reading the graphs of camelcamelcamel. It's sometimes entirely obvious that two pricing algorithms are fighting for the buy box.

You can also see when an item is reaching its long term date[0]: 180-days(or 365 on some markets now) in inventory point: sudden drop in the price. The margin can get negative because the long term fee is very hefty.

Say you sell SD cards or a similar low volume, low cost item: at a certain point in time, the storage fees will be larger than profit, selling them for 0€01 then makes sense...

[0]https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200684750?...

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