So if you ask the average person who is the slimiest salesman, you will hear, used car salesman a lot but frankly with all the internet sites giving you really specific estimates on what a used car is worth, its getting harder and harder to even let yourself get skinned by a used car salesman.
Not so with furniture stores, mattress stores and rug stores.
So here’s the story. my mother in law moved to America and I took her around last weekend to buy stuff for her condo. The salesman acted like they were giving me the most unheard of deal in his life and when I pointed out that I could get the same bedroom set for over $800 less from Amazon.com he just shrugged and insisted that the deal he was giving me was better. I walked out and I was literally starting the car when he offered to match the Amazon price (which coincidentally was about $400 higher than the price I eventually paid from another online site).
Next I went to a mattress store and they were having a memorial day sale and I picked out a high end mattress and the salesman almost immediately dropped the price almost $1000. I bought it online for about the same price as what I negotiated at the mattress store.
Next I went to a rug store and my mother in law picked out a rug she liked and depending on who I talked to the price fluctuated by hundreds of dollars. It was like dealer’s choice until they started yelling at each other in some foreign language and they presented a united front on a price. I don’t know enough about rugs to really have a good idea about price and the internet really isn’t much help so I got a heated rug.
I don’t have a problem with someone making a profit but does buying these items have to be SO frustrating
Shit should have a set price and that’s it. It isn’t fair that you have to haggle to get a reasonable price for a fucking mattress. I bought a new one a few years ago and ended up getting a pretty good deal, but not without an hour’s worth of “negotiating.”
I bought my new mattress and box spring online and found an “online coupon” that got me 40% off the price. If that’s what the mattress is worth, just fucking sell it for that price. The “coupon” only serves as a notice that “normally, we’d be ripping you off”.
I was set to buy a new mattress. I went into a store and asked for a price list and they wouldn’t give me one. Fuck them. I’ll use them to test the mattresses out, get a quote, and then buy cheaper online.
My mattress costs a lot but its a frankenstien’s monster combination of memory foam, latex foam and a bunch fo other stuff. I get great sleep, the problem is that I can no longer sleep on regular mattresses so when I go on trips, I end up working until I am drop dead tired before going to sleep. People think I’m industrious when i’m just trying to fall asleep.
I definitely think my mattress was worth what i paid and the mattress you bought for $285 ten years ago probably costs $500 today (700 before the recession).
You see two rugs at tow different store that look and feel identical. they were made the same way from the same country and it will be $15000 at one store and $3000 at another. I’m sure there is some reason for it but I’ll be damned if anyone has ever been able to explain it to me.
I once read there are more carpet stores than food stores in the United States. Consider how often you need new food (about 3 times a day) versus how often you need new carpeting (once a decade, perhaps?). I wonder if half of the carpet stores are fronts for something else.
You’ve heard the phrase “he lies like a rug?” Maybe we need the phrase “he lies like a rug salesman” to express even worse prevarication.
Check if your local area has some sort of outlet type store. Where I live, there’s a place called Oak Furniture Liquidators that, as you’d guess, sells oak furniture. But, see, I hate the color of oak furniture, so I avoided the place for a long time. When it came time to buy myself a new bedroom set, I figured I’d pop in and take a look just for shits and giggles.
This place is awesome. The prices are bargain basement low and the furniture is great (and I say this as a total decor snob).
When they didn’t have a bedframe like I wanted on the floor, the guy who works there brought out a bunch of Ashley Furniture Store catalogs and told me to find one I wanted. Surely, these weren’t going to be as OMGCHEAP as the stuff on the floor, but what the hell. I picked a beautiful, upholstered bed frame/headboard situation that was huge and generally wonderfully. He looked up the price. “This one is kind of expensive. . .” he said, making my heart sink. “It’s $300, is that ok?” Is that ok? IS THAT OK? Of course that’s ok! FWIW, I went over to Ashley a few weeks later and they were selling literally the identical bed for $1500.
I also ought a mattress at the outlet place, despite being thoroughly warned by everyone about what a terrible idea it is to cheap out on a mattress. I paid $250 for the mattress and boxspring, then went on Overstock and bought the world’s most amazing mattress topper for $100 (4 inches- bottom 2 inches are straight foam, top two are that egg carton texture).
So, for $650, I got an amazing, sturdy, VERY NICE bedframe, a mattress, a boxspring, and a mattress topper. I have the most amazing bed in the entire world— sooooo comfortable. And all with ZERO negotiation bullshit. It was fabulous.
Thanks for the info, I think they are mostly in California but I get your point.
The thing is I bet the $1500 price for the Ashley bed could have been haggled down to at least $750. THAT is the problem. If they start off with $750, I can jsut look at it and say to myself, “I can get a different bed that I like better for only $100 more” but to find out taht the Ashley bed is $750 I have to halggle for 20 minutes and then haggle again for 20 minutes to find out the other bed is $850. It makes shopping simply exhausting for no apparent purpose other than to tire me out so I just buy whatever I have in front of me.
It just pisses me off that these people are relying on obfuscation of pricing for their profits.
Someone mentioned that there are more places that sell rugs than sell food. How much of a mark-up do you think you need to support all those rug stores despite the fact that most people will never buy an oriental rug and the msot of those who do will only ever buy one in their lifetime.
Why should the stores sell everything at their lowest cost?
By pricing a bed at $1500, and being willing to negotiate down to $750, they will have some customers that either don’t know better or don’t care and pay the full cost. Some people take the time and effort and get the better cost.
That’s no different that car sales, house sales, auctions, airline tickets or garage sales.
Sure, a grocery store doesn’t want to take the time to haggle over 5¢ on hundreds of items. For them, it’s easier to mark a cost and stick with it. But just as you and I can bargain shop online, or ask a store to meet someone elses pricing, stores can allow haggling.
I never said they should sell things at their lowest cost.
I said they shouldn’t sell a bed for $1500 to one customer and $750 to another customer. You are basically telling people that if you want a good price you must expend the energy to haggle them down to $750. That is an uneccessary transaction cost and reducing transaction costs SHOULD be one of the things what a free market is designed to do.
Cars have pricing transparency these days. I doubt there is more than a 5-10% difference between the price paid for a new car between similarly situated buyers. There is simply too much information out there for dealers to get away with it.
Furniture is starting to become that way because you can comparison shop apples to apples online. They furniture stores are kicking and screaming but they are being dragged into a more transparent pricing model.
Mattresses still try to maintain that pricing opacity by putting different labels on virtually identical mattresses so that it gets harder to compare apples to apples. This is going away as online resources tell us which mattresses are virtually identical except for the label.
One of the greatest benefits I have gotten from my Iphone has been the ability to negotiate prices more effectively and to comparison shop while I am at one store.
So the same commodity can have vastly different worth at the same store between similarly situated buyers because one buyer has the energy to haggle and the other one doesn’t. Thats fine but I will never actually buy another piece of furniture in a store that engages in this sort of thing ever again.
I used to hate bargaining but after traveling around the world a bit, I miss being able to do it as often at home. I was able to get $250 knocked off of my Tempurpedic (those things never go on sale), got almost $400 taken down off of my Rainsong guitar, and at the Hmong farmers market near me, I’ve left with lots of good prices on fruits and veggies when I bought in bulk.
I have a friend whose PhD work had him bargaining around Chicago. When we visited once, he showed me how to get better deals at places like Marshall Fields. I didn’t believe him but when I got 20% off pants that weren’t on sale, I was quite happy.
To me, being able to bargain for a better price and being a more knowledgeable consumer is key when shopping. If you have a smart phone, you should have a bar code scanner on it so you can make sure you’re getting the best price. Why pay $35 for that coffee maker when it’s $18 on amazon?
When I was a freelance writer, I sometimes had to haggle with clients over the fee I would get paid for jobs; some clients would pay less than others because they person negotiating was savvier, or because I needed the work more and was not in as good a negotiating position, or because I felt like it. Was that wrong of me?
Were you charging one client twice as much as another client on the same day for the exact same work? Were you extracting several times as much profit from one client over another?
If so then you are effectively relying on your high price client never finding out what you charged the low price client in order to get that higher price. I never complain about one vendor charging me a BIT more than they charge some other customer. If I found out they charged me double, I would be pissed.
I love Urban Mattress and I can’t imagine shopping anywhere else…and they delivered my mattress for free and included a bag of Hershey’s kisses all tied up with a blue bow.
