Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

I thought this mentality would be a given on HN but thanks for writing about it.

I would go even further to state that "no way am I going to meet you for a price".

I just recently had the task of finding the cheapest storage lockers for myself.

I called 5 companies. 4 of which gave me their pricing immediately. The 5th company had the most ridiculously gung-ho storage locker saleswoman I almost laughed... she refused to give me a firm price, and suggested that I drive in to meet her (~45 minutes) before she will even hint and what I might be paying..?

I told her I was an experienced (and cranky) entrepreneur at heart and that I didn't feel like playing this game right now. She persisted and I hung up.

Maybe they make more money that way, but it sure is a bad business model.

Car salesmen work the same way I have noticed... I visited a large block of car salesmen recently... Time is money so I simply walked into each dealership and asked them for a price list of a few cars I was interested in.

Nobody would give me one. Not without sitting down for some kind of appointment with a scummy salesman (when they were all just standing around drinking coffee anyways, we're at the height of their demise here).

How is this business tactic still in practice?

I would think consumer protection laws would target it at some point? If you sat my brother down with any salesman, he would walk away much poorer.

He wasted $200 on a "gold HDMI cable" and would probably waste an extra $10,000 on a car if given the opportunity with a salesman, not that he has the money.

At the grocery store, a banana is a banana -- it costs $0.89/lb, and the store's CoGS is $0.69/lb. Car dealers are different -- they don't make money on the car, they make it on the other stuff that the salesman peddles. Thus, no price list.

Software is the same way. Salesmen are there to spot opportunities and get a solution out to the customer. You may sign up for payroll services online, and not realize that for an additional $X/mo, you can get some sort of expensive regulatory requirement handled as well.

If you're dumb, and buy a $200 HDMI cable, how is a web form going to stop you from making poor decisions. A typical startup pricing page has 3-5 plan options.

My brother is not dumb, he simply doesn't know about cabling and electronics. I would venture to bet that you would look pretty dumb trying to perform his job as a carpenter.

All he wanted to do was have the best picture for his brand new PS3, and the salesmen in Futureshop were eager to sell that to him.

Whenever you buy stuff "Let the buyer beware" applies. I'm sure your brother has stories about unwary customers who paid ridiculous amounts of money for awful work that he had to fix up.

A smart customer isn't an expert in cabling -- you just need to know enough to question the person you are dealing with. Or ask more than one person. Or ask google. The whole business model of Futureshop is to be a convenient, one stop shop. Their vision of a satisfied customer is someone who walks out the door with anything that the store thinks they need.

I can do rudimentary carpentry, but I know what I can't do. So when I needed to have a new front door hung, I got a couple of quotes. The prices ranged from $250-$1,500. I think I paid around $600 to an old school carpenter who did an awesome job.

It's still in practice because it's effective. People who frequent HN are not a representative sample of buyers of any product.

Right, and I was asking basically how our consumer protection laws would allow for such tactics?

If a customer asks for a retailer's lowest price on something, they should be forced to answer, not tip-toe around the question asking if they want the best or the worst this-or-that...

Where do you live that car prices are not clearly displayed on the windows? You just walk through the lot, brushing off the salesmen, and note down the prices listed in the window. That's what they want you to pay, and if you're a fool that's what you'll pay. If you're smart, you'll go through a little of the song-and-dance that knocks a significant amount of that price off. Unfortunately for spergy Internet people, that's how buying cars works; I don't much like it either, but if car dealers worked like Amazon, you'd see a Honda listed at $20,000 and that's what you'll pay, like it or not. This way you do get the option to bring it lower, sometimes all the way down to invoice price, because as another poster points out, car dealers don't necessarily make their money that way.

I should have mentioned... I was shopping for used cars. They tend not to place them on the windshields of used cars in actual dealerships in the GTA. Some "show models" perhaps of used cars, but not all.

Ah, definitely an important case there, since not all used cars are created equal.

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