Like the 25 percent promotions, such bait offers often lead to customers buying more than planned. The losers are consumers – every year every Austrian household throws up food worth between 300 and 400 euros – as well as suppliers, whose prices are even more depressed.
Discounts and special offers often only tempt you to buy more, you can really save nothing by comparing prices, warn the consumer advocates. This is made more difficult by “the constant discount it”, however, which inhibits competition. In addition, the discounts are “strictly speaking, artificial price surcharges: in order to be able to grant a discount and still generate a positive contribution margin, the regular price must be set higher from the start.”
“Buy what you need, don’t consume what’s possible”
In the case of the cheap own brands, on the other hand, it is shown that it can also be done without an artificial surcharge: They are usually excluded from promotions and discounts. “The calculation should be pretty tight here and the prices should therefore be closer to the actual production costs,” say the consumer advocates.
“Buy what you need instead of consuming what works,” advises the VKI. The consumer behavior researcher Arnd Florack from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna knows why discount campaigns are so tempting for many people: “Consumers have poor price knowledge and – with the exception of butter and milk – can usually only give very imprecise information about the prices of products They therefore often rely on discounts to assess whether a price is cheap. ” Offers are also often limited in time, which makes them even more attractive. “An unused price reduction is then often perceived as a loss.” One can avoid the artificially induced buying frenzy, for example, through planned shopping with shopping list.
(Those: APA)
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