I have worked in Retail for over 30 years. From hourly to management. Though I can not speak for all retailers, I can for those I have worked for. Keeping clearance areas deliberatly a mess is not done! Clearance is a liability to most retailers. They want it gone as quickly and with as much profit as possible. Clearance does not sell when it is a mess! Gross margin can plummet when clearance does not sell. When gross margin goes south so can a company. This seems to be a typical journalistic assumption with no basis in fact!
what I don't understand is, instead of all the dumb sales and millions of coupons, price the product at a reasonable price and save a whole bunch of money with the ads and printing costs.
you people remind me of the IRS, get rid of the IRS, tax everyone 10%, you won't have tax cheats and the feds will have more money than they will know what to do with.
So the point of this disertation is cut out the BS, price products fairly and you will elimanate a whole bunch of unnecessary costs, and you retailers will be making a ton of money, and the consumer will be buying from you more often ... Oh yeah and you won't have that person in front of you with 300 coupons when you have a gallon of milk to buy.
Wow. I'm all worked up over an idiot writer. Stupid.
Low prices don't mean quality though; if you shop at a Ross or TJMaxx, you ARE getting what you paid for. The soft-line industry of discount stores are there to get rid of faulty or defective merch for less because they know they can still make money. Whether stitches are out of place, or the colours wash out of the fabrics in two washes, it sells, you buy, and the cycle continues.
To retailers, you are the stupid and ignorant farm pigs that reproduce, nothing more.
Stop buying **** that was made in India, China, Indonesia, etc~ You're paying for the hard labour of children who get paid little to nothing for your "great price," and "fashionable" wants, not needs.
Ranting. Safe to say '**** you' to customer service. People are stupid. Go buy your cheap crap and living a sub-par life paycheck to paycheck.
It’s funny to read some of these replies. Many of you feel angry and threatened by the idea that retailers use basic human psychology to get you to spend more money than you intended to spend when you arrived and at least seven out of ten times they are right! Most in-store displays are geared toward and aimed at a specific target buyer and they do all the things this article specified and more and most people, despite the fact that they vehemently deny it…are played – every day. The big retailers don’t make money on selling a few items. They spread the costs and expenditures across an entire franchise and pay big money for people to “create” the types of displays we fall for every day.
As far as clearance items and locations in the stores – what draws people to that area in the first place is price…period! Most of the time the clearance areas of retail clothing stores contain items that did not move off the shelves at full retail in the first place and they are kept in that location until they are sold or wholesaled off to the discount chains.
Things like lighting, chrome, mirrors, flashing lights, sound, music and other things that catch our attention pull us toward certain locations in retail outlets like moths to an open flame – it’s human nature and retailers just play on those basic human instincts. This is part of the reason the item you are looking at has been marked up so high – they had to pay for all that glitz and glamour. When was the last time you went into a mall and shopped in a store that had wood racks and bare concrete walls? Never! A place like that wouldn’t survive three months even if the prices in that place were half of what the glitzy places sold for – it’s just that simple. Part of the problem is, people just don’t want to admit they’re getting hoodwinked!
Something else many should learn of, that's been mentioned on this article's posts: Markup. say you go to walmart and purchase yourself an X-Box for 400 dollars (USD). Chances are, the retailer will make no more than 30 bucks for that X-Box. BUT, the goldmine is in the accessories and the games. I used to work at Best Buy about 10 years ago. The mark-up on audio & video cables there is atrocious. Using my employee discount when I worked there, I was able to purchase a $25.00 video/audio cable for a mere 7 dollars. I believe most call this "buying at cost". In total, I could snag about $100.00 (USD) of cables for a paltry 30-40 dollars at cost, using my employee discount.
so, that Monster-brand fancy cable that costs the general public 50 dollars would cost me between 6-10 dollars, JUST because I worked there. Do your research. As I have worked in retail for over 13 years, I DO know what I am talking about. ^_^
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