Been there, done that. Jeep needed tires. The spare hanging on the back is brand new. Buy three tires, use the spare as the fourth, keep the best of the old tires as a spare.
Shelf space is expensive. If an item is bulky, it either needs to move quickly for a fast turn over, or it needs to sell at a high price to cover the cost of the expensive shelf space.
Kind of like real estate.
Yeah, Jewel was the one I was thinking of in my post. What really annoys me about Jewel is when they have those “Buy 1 get 2 free” sales on meat (usually for Memorial Day, 4th of July, maybe Labor Day.) I see some racks of baby back ribs and think “oh, wow, that’s a good deal.” And then I look at the per pound pricing on them: $9.99/lb. WTF? Baby backs are usually around $3.49 a pound (at least they were when I last saw this type of sale at Jewel.) There is no way anyone around here is paying $9.99/lb for baby backs.
And it wasn’t a one-off. I’ve noticed them doing this for years and years.
Another “buy 3 tires” scenario is people who are only planning to buy two tires, because they have a RWD sports car they like to light up or track, and the rear two tires have worn a lot more than the front tires.
So you go in to buy your two tires, but wait! For the marginal cost of just one more tire, you could actually get 4 new tires! So it’s sort of an “on the bubble” incentive to push you from buying two to buying three/four.
My local Acme does both: they have most of their items marked as “5 for $10” or similar, but there are certain items marked as “4 for $12, must by 4”
This is a trend across the industry that seems to have really taken hold over the past 5 years. It annoys me because I see the “5 for $10” gig as a deliberate move to obfuscate the price. Why make me do math to see how much each item costs? So I can’t easily get a feel for the real price at a glance.
This annoyance is compounded when you see “5 for $10” followed by “when using card”.
There’s a local pharmacy that does that–I would need to have a Plenti card, linked to credit cards and such, in order to get the savings they label on every product in X for Y code.
Their signs might as well say “You are a chump if you buy this without our amazing Plenti card.”
I shop elsewhere.
You need a sharp brain when you’re shopping over here. I just got back from the supermarket: I bought two single packs of biscuits for less than a ‘twin’ pack on an adjacent shelf. I was going to buy one punnet of strawberries but for very little more, I could buy two. Cheese is hard to compare even if one sticks to a single brand - is 300 grams for £2.30 cheaper or more expensive than 500 grams for £4.00?, but if I buy two packs of 500 grams I get the second at half price. And do I really want a whole kilo of cheese anyway?
At the checkout I get a whole bunch of vouchers for something - a quick glance says it’s child-related so I give them to the woman in the queue behind me who has children with her. She looks at me with grave suspicion but takes them anyway.
One reason might be to get bulk sales that might have otherwise gone to a place like Sams or Costco. Even though they might make less profit on those 4 items, that’s profit they might not have gotten at all.
I think Kroger also does the thing where the bulk price is cheaper per unit. So 4 for $10 or $2.75 each.
Not my Safeway (California.) In fact our Luckys almost always has must buy 4 to get the discount deals, while the Safeway usually advertises 4 for $10 ($2.50 each.)
I often don’t buy at Luckys because I don’t need, don’t have room for 4 items, so this doesn’t always increase volume.
However I bet that Safgeway, at least, experiments all the time with how much more they sell at 4 for $10 instead of $2.50 each, since the deal gets varied all the time. They also collect data from the club bard. We bought diapers/baby snakcks when our grandson was staying, and they are now totally convinced we have a newborn.
If you eat enough chocolate, you’ll have to buy more toilet paper.
I feel like Save Mart (Lucky by another name) doesn’t enforce this, but I don’t feel confident enough to say for certain.
If production exceeds demand for a prolonged period of time, a big surplus of product accrues. In order to move the product and reduce that surplus, they will have the type of sale that encourages mass purchases.
In Norway I’ve practically never seen the “Buy 4 for 10.00 or 1 for 2.50” version. Advertisements like this are assumed to a bulk discount.
There is also a cynical side of me that suspects that there are some shoppers who notice the 4/10$ but fail to see the must by 4. Then thinking its a good deal buy a single 12 pack, and don’t notice that they are charged $5.99 at the register.
5 for $10 is basic, elementary school math. Of course one can tell the real price at a glance.
If the store’s policy is that you must buy four of the item to get the discounted price, I assume it would be easy enough to program the POS system so it only charges the discounted price if it sees four of the item being rung up.
It’s two micro-economics principles working in unison.
Economies of scale and price elastcity of demand.
Economies of scale is bascially the principle that the more of item x you can produce in one run, the cost of each item x goes down. A lot of production costs remain constant no matter how many you produce. If the cost of monthly rent of a factory is factored into an item cost that monthly rent doesn’t change if you produce 1,000 items or 50,000 items.
So why not always run at max capacity? Becauase the demand isn’t there (not enough people to buy all the inventory). So how do you increase demand?
Price elasticity of demand. You lower the price, which increases the demand. But you still need to move all that inventory. So you make the sale price contingent on a larger quantity.
My Kroger store has three ways of doing multiple-item sales. The first two are what have already been discussed here - “5 cans of tomato sauce for $1” - if you only buy one it costs only 20 cents, and “4 12-packs of soda for $10, must buy quantities of four” - if you buy one it costs $4.
The third is more complicated. They have Mix-and-Match sales, usually spelled out and listed in a separate section of their weekly sales flyer, of about twenty items(I never counted) from all over the store. The meat department might have Owens sausage, Bar S bacon, and Oscar Mayer lunch meat on sale while the dairy dept. might have Dannon Yogurt, 16 oz. store brand cheese, and Pillsbury biscuits, and so on through most departments. You have to buy say, ten items(sometimes 5, or 6, etc.), but those items can be from any or all of those in the sale. The odd(to me) part is that the savings amount varies among the items - it might be 10 cents off on the yogurt, $1 off potato chips, and 40 cents off bacon, but as long as your purchase of the sale items is in multiples of ten you get the sale price.
IMO, this makes grocery shopping too complicated. If you get one fewer cup of yogurt because the flavor you wanted wasn’t there and then forget to add one of some other sale item, you get to pay full price for nine “sale” items at the checkout. This has also led to my SO giving me shopping lists that try to account for various item-count scenarios. Yes, a grocery list with extensive footnotes 
Yes, that is annoying. Ralphs does the same thing.
Yeah, it’s always easy math in my experience, and even the bulk price is an even number; $10 and not $9.95.
FWIW, I see the mandatory group purchase most commonly on 12 packs of soda. Buy 5 for the price of 3 etc.
Most stores I go to put the price by quantity, e.g. $4.95 $0.31 per ounce. It doesn’t always work out: I remember seeing 3 brands of 1 item (I want to say paper goods like Kleenex at Costco), where one gave the price per sheet, one the price per box, and one the price per yard of material.
Since many here have mentioned Jewel, I’ll add that the last time I availed myself of this promotion for soda was at Jewel. The deal was actually a variation – you had to buy in multiples of 4 to get the price, but there was a limit of 8 items for the price. I think they must figure that saying “Must buy 4 or 8” is somehow more confusing.
At any rate, by putting a limit of 8 items on the sale, they aren’t concentrating on moving the most volume --otherwise you’d think they’d be happy to sell you 12 or 16.
There was a “must buy 4” on cereal this week, also at Jewel. I had to get a man who was stocking shelves to help me, since I couldn’t reach the cereal I wanted (back of the top shelf). He volunteered that he doesn’t understand this whole “must buy 4” business, since there’s limited shelf space available for each variety of cereal and it’s almost impossible to keep all the varieties available on the shelf.
Another question I wanted to ask in my original post but forgot is, why 4? I never see a sale where you must buy 3 or 5 – it’s always 4 items to get the price.
Some have mentioned the “buy one/get one free” promotion. I want to mention that in my area this is different from a “half off” promotion. If the regular price is $3 and it’s a half- off sale, one item will cost you $1.50. If it’s buy 1/get 1, one item will cost you $3, and the second will be free.
Many years ago Dominick’s used to occasionally have “buy one/get two free” sales. You’d think that if the per item price was $3 and you bought 2, the first would cost you $3, and the second and third would be free. This is not how it worked – the first item would scan at $3, the second item would scan at $3, and the third would scan at -$3. I always thought this was whack.
That’s like saying “who would fall for the .99 prices silliness”
Basic math is not the problem. Making our minds work through a tiny layer of obfuscation to get at the price makes it that much more difficult to get a feel for the actual price of what we are buying.
It’s a whole lot easier to see $2 and think “Ok, I spent two bucks”
Looking at “5 for $10” makes it one mental step removed from that simplicity. Trivial for one item, but it makes a difference when shopping for the week.
It’s the new version of ending prices with “.99”
People smugly say “but that’s so obvious I would never fall for it”…so I must be simple minded indeed since my mental “feel” for how much is in the cart is always low, thanks to those .99 prices.