My neighbor come to shop at the store. He specifically called for me, as I don’t stay at the front lines of retail but behind, doing other stuff, and jokingly asked, “can I get neighbor discount?”. I said sure, and while he’s in front of me, I call the supervisor at the phone to approve that. Not even ten seconds pass that he’s shouting in my face “can you hurry with that price? I have something else to do!!”.
I hung up the phone, sorry, you asked discount, I had to approve that, your price is $LIST_PRICE
I’d call it fraud myself. But retailers have been doing this shit for forever. But the thing is that people love this shit.
JCPenny almost went under when they stopped deceptive pricing tactics like 20 years ago and just offered a really low price.
Shit, I worked at a major sports and outdoors retailer and we had tags that said “Everyday Low Price.” Items tagged with that would never go on sale because they were loss leaders (just barely above wholesale to get people to buy overpriced accessories).
I had customers with the items in their cart ask me if it was on sale, I told them it was the lowest price they were going to find and even price checked other retailers whose sale price was higher than ours, and they put it back every time.
People are really fucking stupid.