A few years ago, some local merchants used to run similar promotions, advertising items at ridiculously low prices, but the quantities available were so extremely low that almost no one was able to buy the item at the advertised price…maybe the first 20 customers through the doors.
After that, the shelves would be bare of the advertised item, even though the sale price was good for a week, and the sales policy was that the item was “sold out with no rain checks”, but an internal inventory search could show pallets of the same, identical items in the back room, possibly with a different SKU number.
The goal of advertising the “loss leaders’, of course, was not to actually ”sell” a lot of the items at a big loss, but to motivate foot traffic through the doors of the store by creating the “illusion” that there were great deals to be had, in the hope that the customer would end up spending their money on similar items that were not on sale.
So by limiting the number of items that customers actually could buy, the store hoped to receive the benefits in increased store traffic of advertising very low-priced items, without losing a lot of money actually selling the items below their cost.
This scheme was looked at by the local County DA and was found to be the equivalent of a “bait and switch” type of scheme; and was considered to be illegal and constituted unfair advertising practices.
The stores now have to be careful to stock a reasonable number of any items advertised, and they also must offer rain checks through the sale period if a customer asks, or risk criminal and/or civil prosecution.
Violating fair truth in advertising laws and risking criminal liability was one consequence that these retailers had to contend with, but also, their customers were not stupid for long, and quickly learned to call in advance to verify inventory before wasting time and gas to go.
Customers generally don’t like to be treated in such a manner, so in all, after a brief learning period, the customers became more wary of these vendors, causing them to re-evaluate future advertising. The ad campaigns ended up generating a lot of bad will for these vendors.
The long lasting effect was to make customers more wary of those merchants in the future, and that made their advertising costs higher to reach the same target market.
One has to ask themselves what the intended benefit is of any advertising campaign…one might assume it’s not having sales practices that waste a potential customer’s time and ultimately create a lot of disappointed and pissed off potential customers.
I might speculate that offering consistent value for dollar and excellent customer service does more for the customer and the vendor’s bottom line than does gimmicky and quirky sales events.
Just food for thought…
people have said 100 times, do you understand english?