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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is a page from Amazon explaining it: https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/gp/help/customer/display.html...
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.
Even funnier is "save up to X% or more!" as if "up to" doesn't mean "no more than".
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.
(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
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.
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.
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.
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.