I'm convinced that most big name furniture stores are involved in money laundering. Why else would they list ridiculous sticker prices on mattresses and furniture, but have 20 sales a year with discounts like 50-70% off? No one should be buying a mattress at $10K or a bedroom set at $30K.
I was looking at French presses a while back and just for fun checked out one of these big furniture chains.
They had a very nice looking press for $50, and the restaurant supply store had the exact same press for $7.
So that answers it. They exist soley to take money from people too stupid to figure out the price of things before buying. Then they have sales to sell to the other demographic that does. It's called price discrimination.
Maybe they have more than one store in a location so one can have a sale that concious buyers buy from while the other keeps high prices and can still sell to their main margin generator. Having two stores still leaves a 50% chance that your sucker walks into the good store which is oddly more of a waste than having way more floor space than you need. So you expand it to five or so and have the sale at one store only, and only have a sale on anywhere half the time so the consious consumer class has to not only seek out which store has the best deal, of five, of stores that all bare the same name, but also be willing to wait for a deal when you find none after checking five stores. That will put 90% of the population into the non-consious class that you can get margins off of.
The really infuriating thing is that we have really good local furniture stores selling furniture, which may not be cheap, but it's heirloom quality and made in the USA. The chains are all selling fiberboard crap made in China for maybe 10% less.
The constant furniture store sales are a gimmick playing off of that for most people buying new furniture is a rare event. Most people probably don't pay any attention to furniture prices until they are looking to buy, and their last major replacement or addition was probably years ago. They go looking to shop, don't know prices and oh what luck, this place is having a major sale. I'll shop here.
It's a dated gimmick with the internet since even a low effort search will show they're all basically doing the same thing with the same prices. Forty years ago though it wasn't that simple. You had to go to different stores, hunt for paper coupons and ads, and it was enough work that if you found something you liked "on sale" that might be good enough for you to call off your search and buy. It's just been around forever and hasn't died off with other boomer things yet.
The one I wanna know about are the "gourmet" cupcake shops. Extended family runs a traditional bakery. The gourmet cupcake model makes no sense. In bakeries impulse cookies and cupcake sales are an after thought, and just something you sell on the side cause it's low cost low effort to produce. You keep the lights on by selling breakfast pastries and fresh bread to your regulars who buy those a few times a week. You make your money selling several large custom orders a month where your margins are insane (wedding cakes and the like). The cupcakes are there for a few extra bucks maybe, but just as much to serve as samples for your big custom orders. There's not enough people saying, "Gee I'd like a $6 cupcuke on a whim," to make rent at a major shopping center or mall, let alone it be a good idea as a profitable business. Maybe in a major city where through sheer volume of people, but in suburbia I have no idea what they're doing.
I assume that the cupcakes are brought into the office, or given as thank-you gifts.
↑this. Especially with covaids, everything has moved to single-serving models, instead of big "grab a slice" spreads. Office parties will usually be a fuck-ton of cupcakes now, instead of big cakes that the employees have to touch/fiddle with to get a piece. Hell, even pizza catering: they'll do towers of individual slices in tiny boxes, instead of bringing in regular pizzas like they used to.
I own a retail business. People k Just don't buy full retail anymore. They only buy sales. I put the retail at +20% one week then do a sale of 20-30% off the next . It exhausting trying come up with reasons for sales, but luckily we have enough bullshit holidays so it's not that bad.
I bought from mattress firm. I really didn't need a mattress but the guy kept coming down and down and down and I wasn't even trying.
Probably desperate for legit customers.
Why were you in a mattress store if you didn’t need a mattress?
You don't ever get the urge to randomly buy something as expensive, large, and inconvenient to transport, unload, and store as a matress when you don't need one?
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