Over the years I have received so many flyers from Kohl's with 30% off that I don't even save them anymore. It is overkill and sort of makes you immune to their marketing. That said, I won't even think about shopping at Kohl's unless I have a coupon. There is no need to pay their overinflated pricing when everyone else has a coupon and Kohl's cash to reduce the prices. It's a scam, we know it, but we play the game because we would feel like idiots if we didn't. Right?
When I opened our music store I vowed to never play pricing games with my customers. I hated going into a store and seeing the high prices with huge sale banners. 20% OFF store wide!! All year long. Seriously, why not just post the price and not feel like you have to bait the customer.
Received yesterday in the mail. Current so use the codes! |
Every so often we have sales on special weekends or sometimes I will do a monthly sale for groups of items. Sometimes people love them and other times no one cares. It is a crap shoot for sure. So over time we have not had many sales, we just keep our pricing as close to internet pricing and as low as possible. We hope our customers don't need to play those games.
How exhausting it ISN'T for me to price our merchandise and then never have to change it. We don't need a slew of employees to constantly change pricing, stock end caps or put out new sale signs. When we move one section of the store to a different place it is for a reason, not just because we had to move sale items to a special place.
Next time you go into a small business look around at what they have in stock. Odds are that everything in there had to be paid for when the order was shipped to the store. There are no big warehouses of extra stock, what is displayed is what they have. It is a balancing act and takes a strong wit and flexible character to deal with customers and vendors every single day. We are small business and we have limited resources and none of the effort can be wasted by fake marketing schemes.
If you could take anything from this conversation, realize that when a small business has a sale it is coming off their real bottom line. There is no fairy godmother in the back filling out (non-existent) rebate coupons from wholesalers. Shop local, improve the lives of real people including your own life.
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