A tire shop near me advertises that your tires are free if they can’t beat a competitor’s price. What would stop them from simply giving you a price just a few dollars less than a competitor instead of giving them for free? I highly doubt they’re going to say something like “Well, the other guys are charging $250 (or whatever) and we just can’t do $249, so it’s free.”
If that’s the whole deal that’s what they’ll do. You wouldn’t get free tires unless a competitor quotes you $.01 for their tires.
These guys have been a thorn in my side for over twenty years. I once called their corporate office and asked them if they could provide me with the written policy under which a customer could qualify for a free mattress, and just got a runaround.
It just seemed to me that if they’re gonna say it in their advertising, they damn well better have a written policy with which to implement it.
Are you saying they wouldn’t beat an advertised price?
Tweeter had a match any advertised priced deal and they sent me checks after I bought stereos for my kids and found lower advertised prices. I didn’t ask for them, they had gathered local advertising prices and sent out checks to refund any amount over the lowest advertised price.
The policy is “step 1: confirm advertised competitor’s price. step 2: sell the same item for less than the competitor’s advertised price.” All they have to do to meet the conditions of their advertisement is to follow this policy.
Tires also have to be installed, balanced and aligned.
Ever heard of marketing?
I put it in the same category as, “You can save up to 50% or more by switching to Geico!” Which includes any percentage possible, including zero.
Exactly. It’s a (possibly cunning) way of including the hot keyword ‘FREE!’ in the advertising material, without ever needing to mean it.
So what could happen is that if the tyre shop refuses your advert because its not real,
then you’d be able to claim the advert is real somehow and get the tyres free somehow.
If there is a written policy, they may say “subject to the decisions of the management” (or someone… “Our chosen arbitrater”… who is assessing the advert and attempt to get the price match.)…Courts have even upheld a companies claim that the use of their own choice of arbitrator was binding.
Why stop there?
“If we can’t beat a competitor’s advertised price, we’ll pay you a BILLION DOLLARS!!!”
Not aligned, just mounted, balanced, and put on the car. I worked at a tire shop. But a lot of them offer free alignment checks, and because there’s a pretty good change that a random car off the road is out of alignment, it’s a good way of drumming up business.
They just want to get you in the door. Most tire places also do shocks, brakes, alignments, and other front end stuff, like ball joints and tie rod ends. Every time I did tires, I checked the car for other problems. If nothing else, I gave the people an estimate of how much of the brake pad was left, which suggested to them that they come back to us when the brakes were ready to be changed. Sometimes we’d even give them a coupon for $20 off the brake job if they actually needed one. We also changed oil, and we’d give a discount on that as long as the car was in for something else. If a person could roll a bunch of repairs into one visit, they could save on labor.
They really are serious about meeting competitor’s prices, but it will have to be for the exact same tire, and not all places carry the same brands. You might have a 205/70/15, but if Gooyear’s $35 205/70/15 is a different brand than our 205/70/15, which we sell for $40, we may not be able to meet the price. But once we have you in the door, if we convince you that our $40 tire is a better tire, and our road hazard warranty is better than Goodyear’s, plus we guarantee getting the tires on in 1 hour and they don’t, you might decide to stay. It’s not bait and switch if all those things are true. (I don’t remember if they were, except that I do remember that at the time I worked in a tire place we did have a better road hazard warranty than Goodyear’s, because any Firestone or Expert Tire in the country would honor ours, but only certain Goodyear franchises honored theirs.) IIRC, Goodyear’s tires were slightly better, but way more expensive, and unless you did a lot of off-the-roading, or something, ours were a better deal on the whole. It was usually Goodyear trying to meet our prices.
BTW, that PMCS stuff, where we look for other stuff your car needs has very scrupulous guidelines. We can’t lie. An employee who lies can get in a lot of trouble, and there’s really no motivation to, because employees don’t get a cut of new business. Besides, what we are trying to do is get regular customers who are happy, come back over several years, and recommend us to other people; we’re not trying to gouge as much as we can out of people in a single visit.
I don’t know how you think this would work. If you don’t convince them that the ad is real they don’t owe you anything. If you do convince them that it is real then they just beat the price. There’s no way this ends up with you getting tires for free.
When I switched to Geico I saved negative 25 percent.
(They quoted me a price less than what I was paying at the time. After I signed up, they charged me a price that was substantially more than what I had been paying. They said the quote had been inaccurate because it was for a different area than the one I lived in. I refused to pay and found a new insurance company.)
I think that qualifies. No need to limit ‘up to’ to 0%, as long as it’s possible for someone to save 50%. It could be someone being charged half too much as they should be for their GEICO insurace.
Sure, but it’s jarringly unrealistic. Beellions of dollars arent common things for advertising material to promise, whereas ‘FREE!!!’ is.
There’s no written policy because it’s puffery. They’re not making a legal offer to you, they are making a promotional claim. You’re not supposed to take it literally.
I just hate the way Larry Miller squeals “FREEEEEE!” and I really wish there was a way to make him stop it.
And the car dealership here that likes to say “This weekend only: all reasonable offers will be accepted.”
Sure, who gets to determine whether it’s reasonable or not? And what, on other weekends you only accept unreasonable offers? :dubious:
Ah, mattresses. They can make that claim because it is virtually impossible to comparison shop for matresses. Manufacturers, while they only make a small number of different models, brand their products in an almost infinite number of ways. Each retailer gets it’s own model names and numbers, and they are changed often. The chances of finding the same model (name and number) at two different retailers is extremely small. It is a truely empty promise.
I’ve seen similar claims (with much smaller dollar amounts), especially with car dealers. It’s actually ingenious. They claim “We’ll beat the competitors price or pay you $100!”. They have just limited their potential loss to a set dollar amount. If you do get another dealer quote for $500 lesss on the same model and trim, they have the option of beating the price or giving you the quoted amount, whichever is the better deal for them.
My favorite is “All credit applications accepted!!!”. Um, yeah, you have to. It’s the law. Approval of the credit request? That’s a whole different story.