Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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'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.
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.
Without it, a nearby distributor might look like a more compelling option than the giant monolithic (and near monopolistic) online retailer.
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.
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.
It is a shame the 4 year appliance warranty is gone. Used to be such a no brainer to buy appliances at Costco.
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.
You can trust nothing in grocery stores.
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).
They weren't impressed when I put in two orders of a single scoop....
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.
Even funnier is "save up to X% or more!" as if "up to" doesn't mean "no more than".
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.
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!
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.
if you compare products, one might say "3.24 per EACH" and another might say "0.04 per oz" or some other nonsense.
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.
Here is a page from Amazon explaining it: https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/gp/help/customer/display.html...
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.
we need a decentralized version such that amazon can't just do in and bribe/pay to remove their products from it though.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
There are many ways "why just one" type of questions can be answered, and the "because 2" responses are tired.
Seriously, why the hell?
It’s too much, I can’t shop there
"19 people have looked at this room today, book now!"
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.
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.
It's not limited in any way for any thing that can be sold.
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.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/sr/desktop...
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.
Probably the same in many other countries.
I worked at a company that did this with digital goods.
https://www.nextinpact.com/lebrief/71805/ufc-que-choisir-por...
It's honestly exhausting as a consumer dealing with all these tricks.
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.
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).
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.
> An Omnibus Price is the lowest price that a consumer has been able to buy a specific product for during the past 30 days. As an EU business, it is important to ensure that you display Omnibus Prices on your product pages clearly (...) - https://www.sniffie.io/pricing-vocabulary/omnibus-price/
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.
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.
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?
Agree. I try to avoid using the term "consumer" except maybe when it's talking about actually consuming things (such as food and drink).
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.
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.
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.
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").
Like any business, success and growth changed their motiviations.
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.