USA Today
reports:
Among Thursday's biggest sales incentives and retail deals:
• Buy one, get one free. Macy's rolls out buy one, get one free deals on many men's dress shirts and designer suits, says spokeswoman Elina Kazan.
• Cheap appliances. Sears is offering up to 40% off on appliances for shoppers who use their Sears card to purchase appliances over $499, says spokesman Brian Hanover.
• Free Gas. Kmart is offering its "Shop Your Way" members 50 cents per gallon gas discounts when they spend $25 or more on specific Procter & Gamble products.
My forecast: You will never see prices this low, again. Buy now.
I'm not so certain. seems to me that there is no reason you can't have a howling inflation and a economy mired in depression. where prices are rising but retailers are having slash those periodically to shift stuff.
ReplyDeleteI hate to break it to the retailers but I didn't have enough money to buy more than one present for my kid before Christmas, and I've got no money to buy him anything after Christmas, even if on sale. I have rent due on Jan 1, and groceries to buy.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to the economic recovery
The problem is that the so called non-sale price is simply a jacked up fiction at numerous stores. The so called sale price is the regular price.
ReplyDeleteRecently I bought a pair of leather gloves. They were half off. I had a coupon for another 30% off what remained. In the end, the price was just a bit under what the same gloves were selling for online. Thus after tax and shipping I saved a little, but they weren't the 2/3rd's off the sale and coupon implied. This wasn't the only store playing these games. Another store I got a save $50 on a $100 or more coupon... there were so many gotchas in the conditions it was difficult to actually find qualifying items, because nearly everything was on a non-qualifying sale. Set up this way so there weren't many real bargains. It took some effort to actually get some good buys out of this.
So are these sales really bargains or just a way to make people think they are getting bargains? It comes down to the details and sometimes the execution by the buyer.
I would go even further and say that the concept of a "sale" has no place in Austrian economics' subjective value theory. It's strictly a marketing term. If a retailer could clear a stock of goods at a higher price, it would. A "sale" is nothing more than an announcement of a declining market price for the goods. When the stock market is falling, no one says that there is now a big "sale" on stocks. The only possible exception is for goods priced low as "loss leaders," to generate traffic to the store. In this case, a good might be priced below market as a form of advertising expense.
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