Stupid Best Buy

[fbhjr]

Saturday afternoon, between the restaurant and his house, yebo and I stopped at the mall to get some sneekers and video tapes.*

Best Buy had 3 packs and 6 packs of video tapes.
In the photo below, the 3 packs are on the left, and the 6 packs on the right.


So, if you buy 3 it is $20.99.
If you buy 6 it is $21.99?

Does that make sense to anyone? How do they ever expect to sell a 3 pack if twice as many tapes are only $1 more?
The tapes are exactly the same. Same capacity, same brand, same everything.
Three are $7 each. But, three more are just $0.33 each?
I got the 6 pack.

*Yes, the guys went to the mall to go shoe shopping. The women stopped by a store to get snacks for the game night.

Comments

[saeble.livejournal.com]

its called Consumwhoreism

or, 'Volume sales enticement'

or, 'punish the frugal'

its an evil practise, which I will stamp out as soon as Obama puts me on staff.

I've seen this across most market sectors though not to the same degree of blatancy. Customers generally only buy what they need when prices are reasonable but given the opportunity to spend perhaps another 20% they will buy the 2 for 1 or more product dealy. This way the retailer can rack up a decent profit from volume sales and penalise those who buy frugally. The people who buy only just enough for their needs effectively ammortise the costs to the retailer for those who buy in bulk.

Its a vicious cycle of ramping up consumers to whore status.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Well, I had wanted a 10 pack, so they still annoyed me by only having the 6. But, given their pricing, they would have had to pay me for a 10 pack, so I understand why they didn't do it.

I am aware of this "super size" it selling. I've seen even worse examples of it before.
Once at Burger King, they told me 1 whopper was $2.09 but I could get 2 for $2.
"Can I get one for $1?" I asked.
"No," they said. "One is still $2.09."
"So, you're telling me you're going to pay me $0.09 to haul away an extra whopper sandwich?" I asked.

I took the two and gave one to a guy at work.

But, that stuff it stupid. I know the bulk rate I can get on these tapes is about $2. So, $3.50 isn't bad for a packaged set of 6 at a store that has to pay clerks and such to stock it and sell it to me. But, $7 each is just stupid.

[perrin-o-ravnos.livejournal.com]

what it means is you should have 12 tapes which allows us to take extra video on the trip.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

That's the idea...

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

I've often seen stuff like this - it could be that 3 packs are older stock, and they paid alot more for them at the time. It takes a while to get those through the system. Are you sure that the length of the tapes (or the quality) of the tapes were the same ? Even if the same "brand", it could be a new vendor/supplier won the bid for the 6-pack ones, and they were lower quality knock-offs. There are only a few remaining companies left that make all the videotape in the world now.

With electronic parts, there are often thresh hold quantities of parts, sometimes /often it can cost only a couple dollars more to buy 50 transistors than to buy 10 transistors, based on how they package and stock them. The unit price drops rapidly - sometimes much more rapidly than you'd expect.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Well, their Sony video tapes.
I think they make enough tape to get quantity pricing for most of their tape.
According to the specs on the case, they are exactly the same.
Maybe they aren't. But, you can't tell by looking at them...