Supermarket Pricing Oddities and Rules

Same thing at Fred Meyer. I was going to mention it to the folks above who said when they say 3 for $10, they could get 1 for 3.33 and 2 for 6.66. I can’t. The first and second are probably 5dollars each. These are for soda cases.

“The doctor and dentist may be happy with the extra business.”

Nah. Can’t imagine that.

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Several premises of your comment are wrong.

Start with “it is more profitable to sell as much as possible.” Wrong. It is more profitable to generate as much revenue as possible – how many units you sell is secondary. If you can sell 10 and make a profit of $5 or 6 and make a profit of $7 then it’s better to sell 6 only (I’m keeping the examples simple for illustrative purposes obviously).

“Companies don’t benefit when a product stays out of stock because everything has an expiration date.” What does that sentence even mean???

Expiration dates (on shelf-stable items like canned goods) have nothing to do with original sales – everything sells long before the date is reached. It may help sales down the road when foolish and confused customers throw things away and buy another thinking the older one is actually “bad” when in fact it isn’t. Expiration dates are another whole topic which is better left to other discussions. I’ll just note that their use has come under fire, and there have been calls for regulation of expiration dates, precisely because they do in fact confuse many shoppers.

Sorry, but a good deal of what companies do is done to confuse buyers, and it works. They don’t generally confuse the kind of people who post on sites like Hungry Onion, but it sure does work on ordinary shoppers who mostly don’t pay attention. For them, it isn’t “a lot easier than (I) think.”

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I agree with whatever you deleted. Will you mail a bottle of Kewpie (with msg) to me? :pleading_face:

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I’m not defending business but it doesn’t take much to confuse some shoppers.

For example I was standing in the checkout line listening to a shopper arguing the final cost of a sale product. The sign at the garment rack said “50% off plus an additional 30% at the register”. The shopper kept saying “it’s simple math: 50% plus and additional 30% is 80% off.” 🤦 Unfortunately that’s not how math works.

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