Here in Pittsburgh (Go Pens), there was an ad on TV for a jewelry place called Zales. At the end of the ad this disclaimer popped up. This is it exactly:
Take an Extra 15% off storewide
Off orig./sale prices on selected items. Original
prices may not have resulted in actual sales.
What does the last line mean? It doesn’t make sense to me.
It means that although the original price on that particular piece of gaudy jewelry was $1000 it is entirely likely that no one ever paid that price, and that the original price was inflated for the purposes of giving an entirely imaginary 15% discount.
Right, and likely is in response to a law in a particular jurisdiction that says you can’t call it a sale if the buyer isn’t actually saving money (unless it’s disclosed). Thus, the perfectly opaque disclosure and a legal “sale that isn’t”.
I asked the exact same “WTF” question to my wife when I saw that ad recently. We came to the same conclusion as above.
Back in my retail days, there was a law in my state that you couldn’t call it a “sale” unless the item had been offered at the original price for X number of days. One of the merchandise managers used that to price stuff at “original price” Mon.-Thurs. and then at the “sale price” every weekend.
I remember this because we got a call from the Attorney General’s office asking if we would let them see our ads for the previous year.
And doesn’t “storewide” conflict with “selected items”? Or am I missing something here?
Zales is a chain. My WAG is that it means “selected items in every single one of our stores.”