@Kyeh Worse yet, that .9 of a cent at the end of the gasoline price per gallon. As in, $3.85 9/10 per gallon.
But at the rate they are rising, they will all be whole multiples of $10 / gallon, anyway, by the time Russia Putin has had his way with the Ukraine and its people.
When you go to Walmart and a certain item is $4 for the last year and then you go in one day and see that it’s price is “rolled back” to $4.99 from $6.
@awk@mike808@narfcake
Stupid Haagen Dazs redefined a “pint” from 16 to 14 oz. way back in 2009. And cat food cans were reduced by half an oz.; the cans are the same diameter, but the top and bottom are indented!
@narfcake@unksol So true, it’s like that term “health halo” for ingredients that manufacturers highlight on otherwise unhealthy items because they’re trendy in health food circles. This is more like “science halo” where stats are listed based on zero scientific parameters, or like the example above, Suavitel’s new-found “Stain-Shield Technology” to compensate for their increased unit price.
Grocery store loyalty cards, which then force you to get their app if you want the best discounts. It pisses me off, but they succeeded in getting me to do it, so I guess that’s pretty groundbreaking.
@Kyeh I don’t like them. In theory they should just give you the sale price and leave you alone. But when the choice is Kroger or Walmart and you can get a 6% back on a credit card + a dollar off a gallon of gas if you work it right. I accept it. As annoying as “clipping” the coupons is
@unksol Yeah. I try to take as much advantage of it as I possibly can, while also using their “buy 5 or more various things, get .50 off each one”, BOGO, etc. It’s a lot of work!
@Kyeh
I do that with Sam’s. Gas is the same price as Costco, but I can use my Sam’s branded CC that gets me 5% back on gas purchases… currently over $2 a fill up.
@chienfou@Kyeh The 5% off gas (Costco’s Visa has the same thing) only applies to gas not from Costco/Sams. I haven’t tried my Costco card to pay for gas at Sam’s to get the 5% stacked on Sam’s gas price. It won’t work the other way because Sam’s card is a Mastercard and Costco only takes Visa at the pump.
When you consider the 5% discount from the gas station down the street, you might not be saving anything spending 20 minutes or longer driving to Sam’s/Costco and back from both a time and fuel point of view.
@chienfou@mike808 But if I’m going there anyway, it’s a good deal. I don’t even have their credit card. I actually drive very little, and my Honda Fit doesn’t take a lot of gas, so …
@mike808 I wasn’t the one getting the 5% back. I do get gas discounts at King Soopers sometimes by using their loyalty card. But it’s still a better price at Costco.
The 5% off gas (Costco’s Visa has the same thing) only applies to gas not from Costco/Sams.
Are you sure about that? I am pretty sure they say gas at Costco is covered as well (and FWIW the Costco Visa payback is 4%) I am pretty sure if you use the card at Sam’s you will get the 4% back since Sam’s uses the merchant code for gas station in it’s billing from the pump. What you WON"T earn buying gas at Costco is the Executive rewards (2%) value on the purchase of gas.
Sam’s Mastercard DOES definitely pay back 5% on gas at the pump at the Sam’s store.
Oh and while we are at it. Don’t use the cash rewards to purchase stuff at the store. Get it in cash and use it elsewhere. If you forgo using the card for your rewards value purchases, you lose the percentage you earn off those sales. (think compound interest…)
@brennyn Like postpaid phone plans do, to hide the “up to 30%” in fees they tack on for “administration” (cost recovery for the lawsuits they’ve lost defending the practice) and separating their taxes and industry fees into separate line items - meaning their service fees are entirely profit.
It would be like gas prices being advertised as $2.00/gal with the footnote in tiny print that at the pump you will actually pay $3.50/gal due to the $1.50 federal and state fuel taxes.
And they’ve been pocketing that touch tone recovery fee for yesrs, along with the FCC High Speed Internet Universal service fee while failing to deliver what they said they “needed” that extra fee to do - make residential high speed internet available everywhere for the same price. Except they don’t.
@ircon96 It’s not Putin. Never was. It is the greedy rulers of the OPEC countries.
Putin, if anything was undercutting their prices to take business away from them for the EU countries that would have rather sent money to Russia (and Putin’s merry band of kleptocrats by proxy) than OPEC. Particularly eastern european countries after the breakup of the USSR.
OPEC is: Algeria, Angola, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.
All of which have long-standing anti-democratic forms of government - kingdoms, dictators, and despots.
@mike808 True, but there’s more than enough blame to go around. I was referring more to the current skyrocketing of 50 cents every other day caused mostly by market panic over the tangerine tyrant’s Moscow mistress & his psychotic westward expansion plans.
@ircon96 That’s caused by greedy executives raising prices to boost their record profits, their own pay (based on performance, remember), and shareholder dividends/growth. During the pandemic, corporate profit-driven price hikes have accounted for almost HALF of the 6% inflation. All by themselves. The 1% have increased their wealth 15-30% during the pandemic. Just their wealth, not everyone else’s. And apparently they cannot “afford” to pay employees living wages.
@mike808 Amen. Like i said, more than enough blame, including the half of the electorate that insist on voting against their own interests because they buy the bullshit the robber barons spew forth. Trickle down, rising tide, etc, etc. Wake up, people! Although, sadly, with the Citizens United decision, the fix is in & the sociopaths have even more of an advantage than they had before. Ugh.
@ircon96 Don’t forget the “my body, my choice” folks, except when it comes to forced birth, especially for POC and their systemic institutionalized economic disenfranchisement by the beneficiary and philosophical descendants of plantation slave owners.
You also forgot Manifest Destiny, Self-Made Man, Pull yourself up by your bootstraps to wealth and independence, Success is only possible after hard work, suffering, and perseverence, Rewards are equal to sacrifices, America has no class system, everyone has equal opportunity for success and wealth (and the two are eqivalent), etc.
@mike808 Ahh, yes, the classics! And God forbid we teach a nuanced version of the history of this country to the kids. The good ol’ 'Murican fairy tale must be maintained at ALL costs!
Biggest “deal”, that I actually consider a scam, is the warranty policy on things like car batteries. They design the batteries, test them, figure the average failure age to be “x” months, then set the warranty period for “x” + 18 or 24 months. Then when it fails at “x” + or - 3 months, the only way for you to get anything out of that scam warranty is to buy another one of those crappy batteries. Then wash and repeat with the new battery.
They are attempting to get a customer for life for their inferior product.
If anyone knows of a battery seller who actually refunds money based on the prorated remaining time on the warranty, please let me know.
@phendrickn I’ve only had one battery fail under warranty and it was in a $400 expedition. Yes I bought the whole 97 expedition for $400. Battery was shot from the previous owner for a number of reasons but Walmart prorated it cause manufacturing date. But I didn’t try to get a different brand.
@unksol
That list is obsolete. Johnson Controls’ patents on the plate designs have expired, and several new manufacturers (one domestic, producing crap-ass units for WalMart, and at least one in Mexico, quality unknown) have popped up in the past three years. Most of them are worse - and cheaper to make - than the Johnson Controls batteries, and yet the prices have gone up.
One of the engineers who helped develop the Johnson Controls battery design is a friend of mine.
@werehatrack Many years back when batteries can be had for under $40, WM had some overseas ones with a 1 year replacement/3 year prorated. Not even 3 months later, they were back to offering the Hecho en Mexico Exide batteries. My guess is that they were way too crappy for even WM.
I had a Volvo battery, which was supplied by Deka (East Penn), last over 10 years. I finally replaced when it was slow to crank over. Nowadays, even getting 5 years is considered decent.
@werehatrack might explain why my prorated battery has been very meh in the winter this year. I finally just bolted a trickle charger on it. But then. Very short trips. Driven rarely. 25 year old truck. So who knows
I mean. Menards 11% rebate. This is a regional big box hardware store in the Midwest. That constantly runs 11% off sales.
They literally print off your rebate reciept that you have to fill out a form and submit via snail mail. Like it’s 1999. Then wait for your in store rebate check.
That being said I have never not gotten my Menards “rebate”. And because they are around Home Depot matches their 11% and will send it on a gift card so… Meh.
@unksol
If you save your receipt and you don’t get it you can email them and they’ll look it up and reprocess it for you. I had to do it. I think even if you don’t have your receipt and you know what you bought.
@tinamarie1974 well… I don’t as much mind the use in store thing. I’ll use it eventually. But I could just scan my receipt and submit. Or type in the receipt number. They know.
If they didn’t make you use it in store they wouldn’t do it.
My favorite timeline is when a company tried to set up a gym based business model but for the movie theater and was shocked, I mean SHOCKED that people would actually see more movies than they went to the gym.
The extra .009 of a cent you pay for each gallon of gas.
When gas is $3.799 a gallon, why not say $3.80 and stop “gaslighting” us?!?! (see what I did there?)
I’m honestly surprised that milk, beer or wine isn’t also sold with .009 tacked on.
@accelerator
What gets me is when the larger package has a higher price per ounce than the smaller one, for the exact same product. For a long time, there were a bunch of things like that at my otherwise-favorite store. Then I noticed that all of the scalpage on the big sizes was on items that were eligible for the old WIC program, and the answer became obvious. Oddly enough, when that program was replaced with something else, some of those overpriced large sizes vanished from the store.
@accelerator@werehatrack
What? Businesses taking advantage of poor people and milking the American taxpayer, suckling from the teats of government handouts? I’m shocked! What patriots, making America great by lining their pockets off the misfortunes of others.
It would be like big public companies hiring lobbyists to get to the front of taking big COVID emergency loans and then defaulting on them. Oh, wait …
@accelerator@mike808
To be fair, from what I was able to find out, that old program was so overmicromanaged that the stores hated to be part of it, but had to choose between egregious tracking and documentation, or losing those customers’ add-on items. The replacement program is a lot less overhead-heavy.
@accelerator@werehatrack It was managed by captured regulators exactly as it needed to be to ensure that only large grocery interests (cough Walmart cough) had the resources to stay with the program until the little guys, aka competition, couldn’t afford to stay in the business of feeding poor people. Then jack up prices (as you observed) and only sell shitty unhealthy food at the lowest cost possible without legalizing slavery again - shitty hours, shitty benefits, dumping worker healthcare on medicaid (the community and taxpayers) - all in the name of service and sacrifice to the almighty god of unrestricted capitalism. 'Murica!
Buy {whatever} at MSRP (rather than a normal price) and get a NEW!/Upgrade/NewTech/Bonus! like:
Electric toothbrush with Bluetooth - presumably for those who need to operate a toothbrush from 15 feet away.
Or, a bedroom air filter with New!/Brighter! LEDs - for those who like clean air in their bedrooms while they are kept awake by bright blue lights. (And notice that these never come with amber lights.)
Or my “favorite”: A SmartCarton for eggs that sends a message to a phone when I’m running low on eggs. Because …
All of those deal structures are at least as old as the concept of coinage. There is absolutely nothing ground-breaking about anything in the area of commerce. It’s designed to be a field in which the object is for the seller to demand more than is reasonable (or sometimes possible) and deliver as little as they can get away with.
@werehatrack Exception to the “old as”. Use our app to order and get a cheaper price.
Sorry, I refuse to load my phone with your crappy apps that want permissions to control everything on my phone, including giving you access to my call logs and my files.
@phendrick
It’s the electronic equivalent of the frequent purchaser card, which is a relative of the you-must-be-a-member system, which is the partial successor to the “we don’t serve your kind” model and the “for you, a special price” custom.
@phendrick@werehatrack You’re not getting a “cheaper price”. You’re being paid for a royalty-free irrevocable unrestriced use license for your private and personally identifiable information in perpetuity.
If selling your soul was a thing, this is what it would look like.
@mike808@phendrick@werehatrack
but only if you continue to:
use the app
list your rewards info during purchases
shop at that store.
lesson learned… free usually isn’t.
@chienfou@narfcake I miss the Kmart that was right across the street from the Walmart, and often had cheaper prices on the items I tended to buy. But boy, were they managed terribly. E.g., If I ever had a retail business, I wouldn’t make people wait in slow lines to give me money – that’s just plain dummmmb. There might have been 3 shoppers in the whole store, and two would be waiting behind the other one to check out.
Then they bought Sears. If I had been a Sears employee, I would have slit my wrists right then.
I’m flummoxed by emails I get from various retailers (cough Morningsave, e.g. cough.) telling me to Hurry, We’re about to sell out of items X and Y. Why are you pushing me, you afraid you might not really be going to sell out? And if I buy, then some other poor sap might not be able to buy something they need more than I do.
On a related note, I hate being told what the buying “trends” are. i’m supposed to jump on the Me Too wagon and buy something because the Smith-Jones two houses over in a different state did?
The Mehrathon. That is if we ever see one again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
$5 blow jobs.
@yakkoTDI I love Starbucks
@yakkoTDI
still available if you ‘shop in the right place…’
I detest this so much!
@Kyeh Worse yet, that .9 of a cent at the end of the gasoline price per gallon. As in, $3.85 9/10 per gallon.
But at the rate they are rising, they will all be whole multiples of $10 / gallon, anyway, by the time
RussiaPutin has had his way with the Ukraine and its people.When you go to Walmart and a certain item is $4 for the last year and then you go in one day and see that it’s price is “rolled back” to $4.99 from $6.
@jaybird
That is some serious gourmet shit right there.
Reducing the amount of product, but leaving the box the same size and charging the same price.
/image stonks
@awk Are we talking about "groundbreaking " or infuriating?
Dealbraking, maybe!
@awk
/image grocery shrink ray
@awk @narfcake
Like how a “pound” of coffee is now magically 12 ounces? It was 14 at first, then 13, and now 12.
https://www.craftcoffeeguru.com/5-reasons-coffee-is-sold-in-12oz-bags/
@narfcake But the new & “improved” smaller package is 12x power, while the old crappy version is just 8x!
@awk Bought at the same store, on the same day, same price. The smaller bottle has a different color, so he thought it was a different scent.
I just notice the smaller bottle now has stain resistance! We’ll see about that.
@awk @mike808 @narfcake
Stupid Haagen Dazs redefined a “pint” from 16 to 14 oz. way back in 2009. And cat food cans were reduced by half an oz.; the cans are the same diameter, but the top and bottom are indented!
@ircon96 @narfcake there’s a lot to be said for concentrate. Not that that’s what they are doing
@narfcake @unksol So true, it’s like that term “health halo” for ingredients that manufacturers highlight on otherwise unhealthy items because they’re trendy in health food circles. This is more like “science halo” where stats are listed based on zero scientific parameters, or like the example above, Suavitel’s new-found “Stain-Shield Technology” to compensate for their increased unit price.
@awk @narfcake Well they at least put fewer ones in a smaller bag instead of what they usually do.
How much is a McDouble nowadays anyhow?
BOGO
@heartny 50% off is better.
The .9 cents on the price of gas
@st_ellis Beat ya by about .9 minute (above).
Cheers.
Grocery store loyalty cards, which then force you to get their app if you want the best discounts. It pisses me off, but they succeeded in getting me to do it, so I guess that’s pretty groundbreaking.
@Kyeh I don’t like them. In theory they should just give you the sale price and leave you alone. But when the choice is Kroger or Walmart and you can get a 6% back on a credit card + a dollar off a gallon of gas if you work it right. I accept it. As annoying as “clipping” the coupons is
@unksol Yeah. I try to take as much advantage of it as I possibly can, while also using their “buy 5 or more various things, get .50 off each one”, BOGO, etc. It’s a lot of work!
@Kyeh it probably depends on how you shop/cook. I buy a lot of those get 5 sales
An American express blue cash gets you 3% back on grocery stores. Blue cash preferred gets you 6% but has a. $95 year fee. So have to do some mathm
But you can buy $200 of gift cards during their semi weekly x4 gas points or $250 if you can’t meet the spend.
So a $1 off 35 gallons of gas. It your car doee not take 35 gallons. I take a can of two with me. My parents take both cars at once
@unksol I try to time my trips to Costco so I can get gas there; it’s a little ways away from me but worth it.
@Kyeh
I do that with Sam’s. Gas is the same price as Costco, but I can use my Sam’s branded CC that gets me 5% back on gas purchases… currently over $2 a fill up.
@chienfou Wow - that should be handy in the coming weeks.
@chienfou @Kyeh The 5% off gas (Costco’s Visa has the same thing) only applies to gas not from Costco/Sams. I haven’t tried my Costco card to pay for gas at Sam’s to get the 5% stacked on Sam’s gas price. It won’t work the other way because Sam’s card is a Mastercard and Costco only takes Visa at the pump.
When you consider the 5% discount from the gas station down the street, you might not be saving anything spending 20 minutes or longer driving to Sam’s/Costco and back from both a time and fuel point of view.
@chienfou @mike808 But if I’m going there anyway, it’s a good deal. I don’t even have their credit card. I actually drive very little, and my Honda Fit doesn’t take a lot of gas, so …
@Kyeh If you’re going there anyway and don’t have their credit card, you can’t be getting the 5% cash back from using their credit card.
Unless you’re talking about some different deal with Krogers (we don’t have any around here).
@mike808 I wasn’t the one getting the 5% back. I do get gas discounts at King Soopers sometimes by using their loyalty card. But it’s still a better price at Costco.
@Kyeh @mike808
Are you sure about that? I am pretty sure they say gas at Costco is covered as well (and FWIW the Costco Visa payback is 4%) I am pretty sure if you use the card at Sam’s you will get the 4% back since Sam’s uses the merchant code for gas station in it’s billing from the pump. What you WON"T earn buying gas at Costco is the Executive rewards (2%) value on the purchase of gas.
Sam’s Mastercard DOES definitely pay back 5% on gas at the pump at the Sam’s store.
Oh and while we are at it. Don’t use the cash rewards to purchase stuff at the store. Get it in cash and use it elsewhere. If you forgo using the card for your rewards value purchases, you lose the percentage you earn off those sales. (think compound interest…)
Oh, and VMP.
@Kyeh
I was waiting for that one lol
@Star2236 Yeah, I’m surprised it didn’t show up sooner!
Stores in the US putting prices on things that aren’t the price you pay because they exclude sales tax, local taxes, deposits, etc.
@brennyn Like postpaid phone plans do, to hide the “up to 30%” in fees they tack on for “administration” (cost recovery for the lawsuits they’ve lost defending the practice) and separating their taxes and industry fees into separate line items - meaning their service fees are entirely profit.
It would be like gas prices being advertised as $2.00/gal with the footnote in tiny print that at the pump you will actually pay $3.50/gal due to the $1.50 federal and state fuel taxes.
And they’ve been pocketing that touch tone recovery fee for yesrs, along with the FCC High Speed Internet Universal service fee while failing to deliver what they said they “needed” that extra fee to do - make residential high speed internet available everywhere for the same price. Except they don’t.
@mike808 Sigh. I remember $3.50 per gallon gas!
Thanks a LOT, Putin, you pathetic bastard!! 
@ircon96 It’s not Putin. Never was. It is the greedy rulers of the OPEC countries.
Putin, if anything was undercutting their prices to take business away from them for the EU countries that would have rather sent money to Russia (and Putin’s merry band of kleptocrats by proxy) than OPEC. Particularly eastern european countries after the breakup of the USSR.
OPEC is: Algeria, Angola, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.
All of which have long-standing anti-democratic forms of government - kingdoms, dictators, and despots.
@mike808 True, but there’s more than enough blame to go around. I was referring more to the current skyrocketing of 50 cents every other day caused mostly by market panic over the tangerine tyrant’s Moscow mistress & his psychotic westward expansion plans.
@ircon96 That’s caused by greedy executives raising prices to boost their record profits, their own pay (based on performance, remember), and shareholder dividends/growth. During the pandemic, corporate profit-driven price hikes have accounted for almost HALF of the 6% inflation. All by themselves. The 1% have increased their wealth 15-30% during the pandemic. Just their wealth, not everyone else’s. And apparently they cannot “afford” to pay employees living wages.
Greedy selfish sociopathic fucks, all.
@mike808 Amen. Like i said, more than enough blame, including the half of the electorate that insist on voting against their own interests because they buy the bullshit the robber barons spew forth. Trickle down, rising tide, etc, etc.
Wake up, people! Although, sadly, with the Citizens United decision, the fix is in & the sociopaths have even more of an advantage than they had before. Ugh.
@ircon96 Don’t forget the “my body, my choice” folks, except when it comes to forced birth, especially for POC and their systemic institutionalized economic disenfranchisement by the beneficiary and philosophical descendants of plantation slave owners.
You also forgot Manifest Destiny, Self-Made Man, Pull yourself up by your bootstraps to wealth and independence, Success is only possible after hard work, suffering, and perseverence, Rewards are equal to sacrifices, America has no class system, everyone has equal opportunity for success and wealth (and the two are eqivalent), etc.
@mike808 Ahh, yes, the classics! And God forbid we teach a nuanced version of the history of this country to the kids. The good ol’ 'Murican fairy tale must be maintained at ALL costs!
@ircon96
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
/giphy MLM
Biggest “deal”, that I actually consider a scam, is the warranty policy on things like car batteries. They design the batteries, test them, figure the average failure age to be “x” months, then set the warranty period for “x” + 18 or 24 months. Then when it fails at “x” + or - 3 months, the only way for you to get anything out of that scam warranty is to buy another one of those crappy batteries. Then wash and repeat with the new battery.
They are attempting to get a customer for life for their inferior product.
If anyone knows of a battery seller who actually refunds money based on the prorated remaining time on the warranty, please let me know.
@phendrickn I’ve only had one battery fail under warranty and it was in a $400 expedition. Yes I bought the whole 97 expedition for $400. Battery was shot from the previous owner for a number of reasons but Walmart prorated it cause manufacturing date. But I didn’t try to get a different brand.
For what is worth there are only like 2 companies making all those batteries. I think this list for be accurate.
https://www.cartechbooks.com/blogs/techtips/battery
@unksol
That list is obsolete. Johnson Controls’ patents on the plate designs have expired, and several new manufacturers (one domestic, producing crap-ass units for WalMart, and at least one in Mexico, quality unknown) have popped up in the past three years. Most of them are worse - and cheaper to make - than the Johnson Controls batteries, and yet the prices have gone up.
One of the engineers who helped develop the Johnson Controls battery design is a friend of mine.
@werehatrack Many years back when batteries can be had for under $40, WM had some overseas ones with a 1 year replacement/3 year prorated. Not even 3 months later, they were back to offering the Hecho en Mexico Exide batteries. My guess is that they were way too crappy for even WM.
I had a Volvo battery, which was supplied by Deka (East Penn), last over 10 years. I finally replaced when it was slow to crank over. Nowadays, even getting 5 years is considered decent.
@werehatrack might explain why my prorated battery has been very meh in the winter this year. I finally just bolted a trickle charger on it. But then. Very short trips. Driven rarely. 25 year old truck. So who knows
Everything is free on the internet.
Just first watch these ads.
Kohl’s Cash
@heartny Oh, right! Old Navy is even worse. They give you “Super Cash” but you can’t get it unless you spend $50 or $100.
@heartny Kohl’s Cash is not a deal structure: it is a way of life.
I mean. Menards 11% rebate. This is a regional big box hardware store in the Midwest. That constantly runs 11% off sales.
They literally print off your rebate reciept that you have to fill out a form and submit via snail mail. Like it’s 1999. Then wait for your in store rebate check.
That being said I have never not gotten my Menards “rebate”. And because they are around Home Depot matches their 11% and will send it on a gift card so… Meh.
@unksol Weird!
@unksol
If you save your receipt and you don’t get it you can email them and they’ll look it up and reprocess it for you. I had to do it. I think even if you don’t have your receipt and you know what you bought.
@Star2236 I save my receipts and I go rarely.
Just pointing out that they are weird.
Let us type in the code. Or send a scan. Or a pic of the receipt
Get back a postcard. If it’s for a couple hundred dollars…
I know why they do it but. Update a little…
@unksol I am also not thrilled that the rebate must be spent at Menards.
@tinamarie1974 well… I don’t as much mind the use in store thing. I’ll use it eventually. But I could just scan my receipt and submit. Or type in the receipt number. They know.
If they didn’t make you use it in store they wouldn’t do it.
My favorite timeline is when a company tried to set up a gym based business model but for the movie theater and was shocked, I mean SHOCKED that people would actually see more movies than they went to the gym.
The extra .009 of a cent you pay for each gallon of gas.
When gas is $3.799 a gallon, why not say $3.80 and stop “gaslighting” us?!?! (see what I did there?)
I’m honestly surprised that milk, beer or wine isn’t also sold with .009 tacked on.
Wow! 4 for $5.00 or $1.26 ea.
@accelerator It’s worse when it’s 2/$5 or $2.49 each.
@narfcake
True…true.
@accelerator
What gets me is when the larger package has a higher price per ounce than the smaller one, for the exact same product. For a long time, there were a bunch of things like that at my otherwise-favorite store. Then I noticed that all of the scalpage on the big sizes was on items that were eligible for the old WIC program, and the answer became obvious. Oddly enough, when that program was replaced with something else, some of those overpriced large sizes vanished from the store.
@accelerator @werehatrack
What? Businesses taking advantage of poor people and milking the American taxpayer, suckling from the teats of government handouts? I’m shocked! What patriots, making America great by lining their pockets off the misfortunes of others.
It would be like big public companies hiring lobbyists to get to the front of taking big COVID emergency loans and then defaulting on them. Oh, wait …
@accelerator @mike808
To be fair, from what I was able to find out, that old program was so overmicromanaged that the stores hated to be part of it, but had to choose between egregious tracking and documentation, or losing those customers’ add-on items. The replacement program is a lot less overhead-heavy.
@accelerator @werehatrack It was managed by captured regulators exactly as it needed to be to ensure that only large grocery interests (cough Walmart cough) had the resources to stay with the program until the little guys, aka competition, couldn’t afford to stay in the business of feeding poor people. Then jack up prices (as you observed) and only sell shitty unhealthy food at the lowest cost possible without legalizing slavery again - shitty hours, shitty benefits, dumping worker healthcare on medicaid (the community and taxpayers) - all in the name of service and sacrifice to the almighty god of unrestricted capitalism. 'Murica!
Buy one, get one 50% off. It actually amounts to only 25% off (at most), but because many folks are bad at math, they’re fixated on the “50% off”.
Buy {whatever} at MSRP (rather than a normal price) and get a NEW!/Upgrade/NewTech/Bonus! like:
Electric toothbrush with Bluetooth - presumably for those who need to operate a toothbrush from 15 feet away.
Or, a bedroom air filter with New!/Brighter! LEDs - for those who like clean air in their bedrooms while they are kept awake by bright blue lights. (And notice that these never come with amber lights.)
Or my “favorite”: A SmartCarton for eggs that sends a message to a phone when I’m running low on eggs. Because …
Buy 4 items, get $0.50 off each item. I only need three of the items…
@hchavers you only think you need 3
@hchavers If you have to buy four to get the “special price”, the on-shelf defect/spoilage rate is probably 25%.
All of those deal structures are at least as old as the concept of coinage. There is absolutely nothing ground-breaking about anything in the area of commerce. It’s designed to be a field in which the object is for the seller to demand more than is reasonable (or sometimes possible) and deliver as little as they can get away with.
@werehatrack Exception to the “old as”. Use our app to order and get a cheaper price.
Sorry, I refuse to load my phone with your crappy apps that want permissions to control everything on my phone, including giving you access to my call logs and my files.
@phendrick
It’s the electronic equivalent of the frequent purchaser card, which is a relative of the you-must-be-a-member system, which is the partial successor to the “we don’t serve your kind” model and the “for you, a special price” custom.
@phendrick @werehatrack You’re not getting a “cheaper price”. You’re being paid for a royalty-free irrevocable unrestriced use license for your private and personally identifiable information in perpetuity.
If selling your soul was a thing, this is what it would look like.
@mike808 @phendrick @werehatrack
but only if you continue to:
use the app
list your rewards info during purchases
shop at that store.
lesson learned… free usually isn’t.
free raw turkey with $200 purchase
Deals. Huh.
/giphy tv show “lets make a deal”
/image 'monty hall problem"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
@f00l
/giphy “door number 1”
Here’s one that pisses me off:
Flash sales. I’m not sure how much flash usually costs, but I wouldn’t buy it on sale anyway.
@heartny depends on who is flashing
@heartny
@heartny @narfcake
I remember those days!
@chienfou After the current round of closures, there will only be three Kmart stores left in the 50 states.
@chienfou @narfcake I miss the Kmart that was right across the street from the Walmart, and often had cheaper prices on the items I tended to buy. But boy, were they managed terribly. E.g., If I ever had a retail business, I wouldn’t make people wait in slow lines to give me money – that’s just plain dummmmb. There might have been 3 shoppers in the whole store, and two would be waiting behind the other one to check out.
Then they bought Sears. If I had been a Sears employee, I would have slit my wrists right then.
I’m flummoxed by emails I get from various retailers (cough Morningsave, e.g. cough.) telling me to Hurry, We’re about to sell out of items X and Y. Why are you pushing me, you afraid you might not really be going to sell out? And if I buy, then some other poor sap might not be able to buy something they need more than I do.
On a related note, I hate being told what the buying “trends” are. i’m supposed to jump on the Me Too wagon and buy something because the Smith-Jones two houses over in a different state did?