The beginning of any season is shopping time. But do not forget about all sorts of tricks of sellers, fake discounts and other tricks.
Any seller is always looking for a way to cash in on their customers. Whether it's odd promotions or a premium, there should always be a benefit. Yes, and buyers are led on such tricks quite easily - most of them look quite ordinary and do not cause suspicion. For example, the most frequent trick of sellers is to slightly increase the price of an item a couple of weeks before the sale, so that the price can be further set even higher than the original one, and pass it off as understated. Such techniques are most often used with not very large discounts - 10%, 20%, and maybe 30%. We can only say for sure that if a product has a price tag with figures of 70%, or even 90%, then, most likely, the discount will be real - but, of course, not so huge, but will be about 30-40%.
Such tricks are quite easy to figure out - often sellers, without hesitation, glue a new price tag on top of the old one, and it becomes quite easy to peel it off and find out the real original price. Moreover, quite, one might say, lazy sellers can glue and glue these price tags on top of each other, creating many layers. Therefore, if you see bright stickers screaming about a new price, you should not immediately fall for it.
Price tags can be used in an even more insidious and dishonest way. Often, the original price is simply not even printed on the label, trying to convince the buyer that some abstract price is definitely a reduced price.
Also sellers can do magic tricks with numbers. Calculating a 50% discount by dividing the price in half is usually not difficult - which is why sellers rarely use such a discount. More often, there are discounts of 30, 60, even 45 percent, because sellers are guided by the fact that the buyer will not bother and calculate a discount, which in the end is likely to be much less than the declared one.
The term of this or that action can also be tricky. For example, in one store the promotion lasts until the end of August, while in another it may last only until mid-July. But in any case, the showcases in both will be changed only at the beginning of the autumn season.
Another risk of sales is poor quality items. But next to discounted goods in 90 percent of cases there will be a label “Goods bought at a discount cannot be returned or exchanged”, which, by the way, violates the law on consumer protection. Household appliance sellers use an even more unpleasant trick - advertising, for example, of a refrigerator; the customer is set up to buy and comes to the store with the thought that today he will buy a refrigerator; the buyer is told that this model is over, they are offered something more expensive, and the buyer is involuntarily led to such a marketing move.
Even taking into account all of the above tricks, they remain nothing compared to the biggest hype in the sale. In fact, the price that we see after the discount is the price that the product was originally supposed to have. If you add up the cost of the goods and all the necessary markups (those that go to the salaries of employees, rent of premises, and so on), the price of goods without a discount will still have a fairly large markup. It is impossible to know what this money is spent on, but in the end it turns out that the price of the “discounted” product is equal to its cost, therefore, although it turns out that you buy the goods cheaper than usual, this discount is still not fair.
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Here is what the chairman of the board of the Confederation of Consumer Societies says about this: “The procedure for conducting sales in Russia is not regulated. The European Union has a special directive that outlines the requirements for sales. For example, it contains a ban on such techniques as live bait fishing, when the network advertises certain types of goods at a very low price, but at the same time brings them in small quantities. This is not prohibited here and is used, in particular, by many home appliance stores.
Sales cheating has been a fairly stable thing over the past 15 years. Another common technique is ads like "goods cannot be exchanged and cannot be returned." This is complete nonsense, if something does not fit in size, then the discount does not affect it. If the seller refuses to accept, you need to call the administrator and with him look through the law "On Protection of Consumer Rights", and in extreme cases you can sue or contact Rospotrebnadzor."