I read an interesting interview with the wine buyer of a major UK supermarket, where he said that the best way to sell a product was to apparently reduce it in price.
He tested his contention by selling a wine at £9.95. They then sold it at £4.95, labelling it in some stores as ‘reduced from £9.95’, and in others as just ‘£4.95’. The ones with the reduced ticket sold 70% more than the other one.
No surprise, perhaps. It proves we all love a bargain - but only when we’re told it’s a bargain.
For grocery stuff, I pretty much ignore price. For me, quality trumps quantity, so I shop at a highish end grocery store and pay a bit more than I have to.
I’ll admit to falling for this one - although until your post, I hadn’t really thought about it, and it may be that the “half-price” wine I buy is genuinely reduced to clear stock. I think it also applies particularly to goods such as wine, where there is a perception that you get a better-quality product the more you pay. When I see wine advertised as “Half Price - £4.95”, I think “I’m getting a bottle of wine worth a tenner for £4.95”, whereas if it was just marked as “£4.95”, I’d think “Well, that wine is worth £4.95”. For something like milk, or flour, or whatever, I just get the cheapest available, and it doesn’t really matter how “reduced” it is.
I’m doing okay now (though not rich by any means), but there have been times in my life when I definitely could not afford to ignore price, even on little things, and I developed habits that are still with me, like only considering buying certain things when they’re on sale (or waiting to buy certain things when the prices got lower).
Finding something that I wanted but normally couldn’t afford (or, at least, was normally so expensive that I’d have had a hard time justifying buying it for myself) at a significantly reduced price feels like getting a gift from the universe.
I try to keep track of what groceries usually cost, so that if they are on sale I know whether it’s actually a good deal or not. ‘Reducing’ prices is a common gambit.
IMO the best thing to do is to keep enough staples on hand that you never have to buy things that aren’t on sale. For example, if tuna is on sale for 30 cents a can (down from 60 cents), buy 10 cans so that it will last until the next time it’s on sale.
I’m a sucker for it. It’s much easier than doing proper research.
Case in point, I just bought a shop-vac at Sears because it was 50% off. Now, even the box says “Limited offer” or something along those lines, so this is clearly a special item with a unique product number made just to put in the flyers to start off the holiday sales season. Which means I have every reason to believe that the shop-vac I bought is not really 50% off, but merely manufactured cheaply so that they can sell it for 50% less than their normal non-sale item, which is probably far superior to whatever I just bought.
Wine is possibly the worst product to run this test with. While there are a few good low priced surprises, for the most part a $10 bottle is simply not going to be all that good. Put a top shelf bottle on the bottom shelf, and most people who aren’t connoisseurs will pass right over it.
Repeat the test with something like frozen vegetables and see what happens.
I buy most things for reduced prices (or as we call it around these parts, on sale ). Safeway has that stupid thing where you get Club Card savings for having their stupid “loyalty” card, and it is a rare day when my receipt doesn’t have a good chunk of savings on it (some days I really impress myself, getting like $30 off on a $90 grocery shop). As for things like clothes, I shop almost exclusively in the clearance racks - my logic is that if they can sell a pair of pants for $15, they were ripping me off asking $45 for them.
I believe I deserve the very finest of everything! I want top-of-the-line, spare-no-expense, the very, very BEST. Name brands only, please, my sensitive palate can tell the difference like the Princess and the Pea.
However, I am reduced to scrimping and saving like I’m borderline poor, because I only have so much money for only so many things to buy - and there isn’t any more money when it runs out, until next payday. ‘why don’t you buy Land O’ Lakes butter, Sali? does it cost so much more? why don’t you buy the Starbucks ground coffee instead of Folgers?’ duh - there’s about $10 extra, right there, and I need the friggin’ $10 to pay for gas to bring the groceries home! That’s why.
Important enough that I rarely see need to pay full price.
I am a coupon whore, and love The Grocery Game. Basically what that is is a service where, for $10 every 2 months, I get a list of everything on sale at my local grocery, and how those sale prices line up with any non-expired coupon. Combine the sale prices with the coupons, and I often get items for free. When things are a killer deal, I stock up. To give you an idea, I recently rang up $217 worth of groceries. But, after my club card was entered and the coupons accepted, my total was $96–and I had a shitload of cereal, meat, and other staples we as a family love. Bonus is, some items are free with coupons (i.e., sale price: 10/$10; then I have a 50 cent coupon that is doubled…voila! Free stuff).
Of course I pay full price for items I specifically want or brands I prefer…it’s just nice that by buying on sale, I have more money to buy other things.
I do too, or buy things we’re not out of yet that are on fantastic sale. I only do this for things we’ll need eventually, and won’t spoil while it waits on the shelf (and we have room).
I used to work for a major UK retailer, and it was common practice for the company to buy a £4.95 item, sell it for a certain amount of time for £9.95 (to comply with UK laws), and then to sell it at ‘£4.95 reduced from £9.95’. They knew that if anyone did buy it at £9.95, they’d make a massive profit, but the whole point was to drive sales at the £4.95 ‘reduced’ price. It always worked. They knew that just selling it at £4.95, with no ‘apparent’ reduction, would not be as successful.
In Spain it is required to leave that information (it’s a relatively recent thing); not just what was the original price but any in-between reductions.
I won’t buy something I wasn’t going to buy at its regular price just because it happens to be reduced, but if I was going to buy it and it’s reduced I may buy an extra item. I’m a sucker for “3 for 2” and similar deals, but you have to be careful with “package deals,” as sometimes the larger packages are more expensive per item than the smaller ones.
No reconfiguration, but sometimes there is what’s called a “B series:” items which have two sets of “acceptable” specs. If it makes the narrower set, it gets labeled and sold at the higher price; if it doesn’t but still makes the wider set, it gets labeled and sold at the lower price. Occasionally demand for the low price “version” will get high-price-version-spec material sold as the lower product.
I understand the logic of this where there are two different labels ie a premium brand and a lesser brand, which are the same but the latter are to lower spec. But my response was not to that situation. We are talking same brand and (presumably) same warranty, and the suggestion was that the item was manufactured so much more cheaply that it would justify a 50% price. Not at all likely.
In the US a product must be sold at the “regular” price for a minimum percent of the time in order for the company to legally advertise the reduced price as a “sale price”. This is usually regulated at the State level and is designed to avoid situations where an item is perpetually “on sale”. This is one of the reason stores often rotate sale items within a given category. For instance, there is often one brand of ice cream on sale at the local grocery store at any time, but the exact brand alternates week-to-week.
But to answer your original question…
Yes, I do shop sales. As much as possible I avoid buying things not on sale, aside from warehouse stores which typically do not have sales. If it is an item that I am not too familiar with, I will be influenced by seeing 50% off, for example. If I know the price well, the magnitude of the discount is less important than the final price.
I’m an excellent shopper, and don’t buy things I don’t have any use for, at any price. But once in a while I find an item that I don’t usually buy because it’s overpriced . . . but on sale it’s a bargain. That when I stock up.
). Safeway has that stupid thing where you get Club Card savings for having their stupid “loyalty” card, and it is a rare day when my receipt doesn’t have a good chunk of savings on it (some days I really impress myself, getting like $30 off on a $90 grocery shop). As for things like clothes, I shop almost exclusively in the clearance racks - my logic is that if they can sell a pair of pants for $15, they were ripping me off asking $45 for them.