We’re all used to BOGO (buy one, get one free) sales, but maybe six times over the past year Thomas’ English muffins have gone on a Buy one, get TWO free sale – and I’m wondering what it might mean.
Is it just a ramped up offer to get attention, since BOGOs are relatively common?
Does it mean the company is in some sort of to the death fight with a competitor?
Does it mean the company is in dire straights, and is resorting to this as a desperation move to attract new customers?
And, regardless, does it mean they have been charging roughly three times as much for their product as they ‘need to’ all along?
It tends to be used for relatively expensive perishable products. I see it most often for Thomas’ English Muffins (at around $4.75; never on direct discount), Entenmann’s pastries ($5-ish, ditto) and Utz potato chips ($4.50, often in other sales rotations). Sometimes one or the other mid-tier ice cream half-gallons.
It looks to be an end-point way to relieve excess inventory without damaging the brand by discounting the shelf price.
That’s not as much a factor as it useta-mighta been, since most grocery stores now include an automatic unit calculation on the shelf tag. (Not that the chosen unit is always very useful; knowing that Brillo pads are 29 cents per ounce or coriander is $1100 a pound, for example…)
The endless sale price shuffle, often on the same items within days, is called “shelf news” and is meant to attract shopper attention to products or brands. Some people respond to a flat discount; some are BOGO-matics; some are N-for-$X nuts. But the attention garnered by changing it, even over a very small cost range, is the object.
Huge discounts like BOG2 are, as I said, often to quickly reduce back stock of medium-term perishables.
Plus most people have cell phones in their pockets, and even the dumb phone I used decades ago had a calculator function. So if you can’t manage the mental arithmetic, you probably have something in your pocket that can help.
Note that sometimes the BOGO offer requires you to buy two items while other times you can just buy one at half price.
BOGO is “take one or two, your choice” - and I have seen people forego the free item because they didn’t need it. It’s “N for $X” that can be either 4 for $4, no exception, or basically $1 each. My grocery does a lot of that pricing and it’s always effectively a unit price. The ones that require buying N items are usually manufacturer - typically Pepsi or Coke products. I have learned to look closely, though, as sometimes the store tag has a small slug “MUST BUY N” or the like.
Just to be clear, this isn’t just a new slogan for the old sale? They’re not advertising “Buy One, Get Two” and then saying “You’re getting two. You paid for one and the second one’s free. That’s two.”? You’re actually getting a total of three for the price of one?
Ah. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes sense. You get rid of surplus, keep the image that your product is indeed ‘worth’ the usual price, maybe draw in some new buyers who might continue to buy after the sale is over – good combo!
And it’s certainly more appealing than reducing production by cutting hours/laying employees off or the like.
An extreme sale might also be a loss-leader by the grocery store. Offer English muffins so cheap that you take a loss on them… but then put high-margin name-brand butter, jam, peanut butter, etc. on the shelf right next to them. A customer (who might not have come in at all if not for the sale) comes for the muffins, but then picks up enough other items on the same trip that it’s still a net profit for the store.
The Albertson’s here does these sales all the time with their meat. So like, $5 for 3lbs of boneless/skinless chicken breast that’s normally 2.50/lb. Though I do notice they tend to do it with meats that have been ‘pre-seasoned’.
This indeed makes a lot of sense, but in supermarkets I have found that it’s now much more common to see an offer price quoted as (say) “$1.49 each if you buy 2.” And the odd thing is that sometimes there’s a higher price if you buy one, but sometimes they give you the sale price anyway if you only buy one.
I think many people just enjoy the game of feeling like they are “beating the system” by finding the best possible deals, even if the amount of money at stake is fairly trivial. So that draws people in to supermarkets that have endless more and more complicated money-saving offers. And, ultimately, it’s an opportunity for those who really need to save the money, so fair enough.
Safeway must be running experiments with this, since for soda there are buy one get one free, buy two get one free, buy two get two free, and buy one get two free sales in great profusion. Also 2 for $5 ($2.50 each) which I bet increases the number of people who buy two, and some buy two for so much each, you must buy two.
BTW, and weirdly on topic, in Shel Silverstein’s extremely adult revue, one of the bits is called “Buy One, Get One Free” where the sale refers to hookers. If this ever comes to your town, go and see it and DO NOT bring the kids.
“You can have one if you want to. You can have two if you want one.”
Unlike ‘twofer’ sales it means the price for one or two of the item is the same. Essentially the second one is free if you but two. It may be a good deal such as perishable items near their expiration or ‘best’ date, or the price may have been hiked so that buying one is more expensive that it was before, but it means that the price is the same if you but either one or two items.
A ‘twofer’ sale may require you buy two items to get a price less than twice one of the items. Sometimes it doesn’t, if it says ‘2 for $2’ the price for one may still be $1 but they’ll hope people will buy two thinking it’s a good deal.
There is a kiosk in my local mall that sells small toys. Every time I walk buy it, they are using a different pricing gimmick. But they always end up being 3 for $10. Sometimes they are $5 each, with a free one if you buy two. Other times, they are $3.33 each. I have also seen them just say “3 for $10”.
“Buy one, get one free” means the item is overpriced to begin with, or the business needs to get rid of its stock before it becomes relatively valueless.
In the gardening world, this refers to chrysanthemum plants on sale in October. I also recall a large retailer of tropical plants whose prices would start out very expensive at the start of the growing season, start dropping and by the end of the season would be cut “70%!..90%!!!”, meaning that you’d finally pay about what they were worth.