The two big supermarket chains in my area regularly lead their weekly ads with 10 for $10 specials. Say, 10 oranges for $10 or 10 Gourmet to Go items for $10.
They could just as easily advertise at $1 each, so use of the 10 for $10 ploy must be for some sort of marketing psychology reason. What is that reason?
Because you get TEN for only ten dollars. Otherwise you have to pay a dollar EACH.
Isn’t it just because they want you to buy more of the on-sale item?
After all, the stuff is on sale because they have too much of it and need to move it, right? So advertising “10 Oranges for $10” is likely to move more merchandise than “1 Orange for $1”.
Especially for those shoppers who infer from the sign that they’re required to buy AT LEAST ten oranges to get the good price.
Once I saw popped popcorn on this special. I doubt anyone bought 10 of those big bags - they’d barely fit in the car.
As a former grocery store employee, I can say this happens a lot. He had big 10/$10 sales at least once a month, and we would get a lot of customer buying exactly ten of each item.
Am I missing something here? It sounds like you’re saying these are items that are normally a dollar each?
I would have expected it to be something more along the lines of 10 for $10, or $1.25 each.
When (most) stores have a 10 for $10 sale, in reality each item just being marked down to $1. So you could buy 1 for $1, 6 for $6, etc.
Well, there you have it. You’d think that anyone who ever shopped in a supermarket before would have figured out that you get the same deal when you buy just 1.
OTOH, that’s usually not the case when it comes to coupons.
It’s not that the items are normally $1.00 each but that they’re now on sale for $1.00 each. The sale is real, in that they probably were $1.25 or whatever in the past. This week, though, they’re 10 for $10 instead of 10 for $12.50. Sounds much better that way.
Undoubtedly someone did massive focus group testing to determine that 10 for $10 works better than 6 for $6 or 12 for $12.
I dunno, but when the one near me does it, most often it is something like “10 for $10, or $1.59 each”. NOT $1.00 each.
The general reason, I suppose, would be volume. If they move a lot of it, they probably get a better volume discount on the item on their end too.
Even if people know that they can get them in smaller quantity for $1 each, that sign - repeated all over the place, generally - works the number 10 into people’s unconscious. I’d bet you ten imaginary dollars that if you changed the number, even if you went up, you’d find most shoppers buying exactly the quantity you put on the sign or a multiple of it. What’s more, I’d bet it’s for stuff that, without the sign, even at $1 each, they’d buy five or six or seven of. So the grocer makes more because he sells more.
I used t work in the big corporate supermarket industry. For some reason, people think that store managers just make up stuff at each store on a whim when this is hardly the case. It is mega-big business with lots of people at the corporate level plus the large vendors making the decisions and the formulas are well worked out. All of the reasons people have given are correct under some circumstances. People will tend to buy more if you give the advertisement in volume rather than a discount per unit sold which is why they use that.
That is a minor league question. If you ever saw the money that gets passed back and forth between shelving fees, advertising cooperation, buy one get one deals, vendor fines, service level agreements, and lots of others between the vendor and the end consumer, it would make your head spin. It isn’t simply a matter of putting things on the shelf and waiting for people to buy what they want. There are lots of people and money involved for any given product. The chains themselves have fairly little control over the biggest suppliers like Coca-Cola and Procter and Gamble who own lots of the fastest moving items. They effectively own the shelf space in the stores and push the deals down to the entire market area.
The entire concept is called marketing and it is very elaborate.
Well, one time in Houston I was shopping at my local supermarket, and on the way out I noticed a dry cleaners next door that had a big sign - 3 suits cleaned for ten bucks (this was a long time ago). The next time I went to the store, I brought along a couple suits and dropped them off at the dry cleaners.
When I came back to get them a few days later, the guy said it was 16 bucks. I said how do you figure two for 16 when it’s three for ten, and he said you didn’t have three, you had two. I said I can see not charging me the same rate per suit, but not charging me more for cleaning fewer suits.
I couldn’t make him see reason, and I didn’t want to make a scene over six bucks, so I gave up, and obviously never went there again.
Probably. It sounds as though they might be playing on some people’s assumptions that they have to buy ten items to get this deal - or is that really not the case (if it’s not, that, and it’s widely understood that it’s not a multibuy saving, then it’s something really alien to me, as we don’t see that here)
Supervalu (Acme/Albertson’s/Jewel/Shaws) started this about five years ago and now I notice that Safeway (/Tom Thumb/Dominick’s) is emulating the technique. Individual items are indeed $1, but they have an entire endcap display of things that are “10 for $10.” They even do it for things that few people would buy 10 of, such as toothpaste.
The fact that they’ve kept it up for so many years must mean that they’ve seen appreciable results.
Maybe they do it to generate free word of mouth advertising in the form of people discussing what may be their possible motives.
Uh, Meijer does this:
10 for $10, and the 11th item is free. Otherwise, each individual item is just $1. The idea is to get you to get a bit more so you can get your 11th item free.
Isn’t this how everyone does it?
Nope. Never seen it. Buy two, get one free. Maybe even three. But ten? Never. It’s always 10 for $10 if they do it at all.
All the stores I know divide the offer quantity by the offer price even if you don’t buy the total quantity. That creates a half-penny loss if the division comes out as a fraction, and they round up. Otherwise, I don’t hesitate to buy what I need, not the ridiculous quantity.
It may depend on the state, but I think in a lot of places the law dictates that if a grocery has a product marked “10 for $10” they actually have to sell the item to you for $1 instead of, say, $1.50, if you only buy one.
Though, I think the rules are different for other retailers. The Walgreens where I live, for example, regularly have specials of “2 for $5.” But if you only buy one, you may end up paying $2.99 for it.