Patrick Coffee
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard Sep 2023
Patrick Coffee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, it's one of the oldest practices in the retail industry, and it's relatively simple.
For example, if you have a shirt or a vest that regularly sells for $19.99 at a given store, the retailer will briefly raise that price to, let's say, $40 and then bring the price back down and advertise the item as being 50% off for a limited time.
And in some cases, allegedly, the retailers don't even bother to actually raise the price.
So they give the illusion of the item being on sale when in fact that's just not accurate.
It's almost every retail chain and also big e-commerce companies like Amazon.
For example, in our story, we cited a research paper that went over the sales of vacuum cleaners on Amazon over a given amount of time in 2017.
It found that one seller in particular had listed this specific vacuum cleaner for $114.99 and then over about 48 hours raised the price.
So it was disguising a price increase as a discount.
And if consumers haven't been closely tracking the changes in that price, they wouldn't know it.
They said that they have now enacted ways for consumers to report sellers if they see this going on.
It's not clear that it has stopped.
It really seems like a bit of an extended game of whack-a-mole where you can take down one seller and another one will pop up.
Well, what analysts told me was that the practice all but disappeared during the pandemic because people weren't going out shopping and retailers didn't have this glut of inventory that they needed to get rid of.
Now, however, their sales are beginning to drop after the post-pandemic boom, so they really need to unload all this inventory and they're desperate to beat out their competitors in terms of sales volume.
So they're going back to what has worked for them in years past.
In most cases, I would say no.
I mean, speaking for myself as a consumer, I really had no idea.
And that's one of the reasons that I found this story so interesting.
On the one hand, you see these sale promotions all the time and they start to blend together and you wonder how accurate they are.
But I really didn't know exactly how this goes down.
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