Just about every day of the world I get a bunch of advertising mail, either post office mail or emails, offering all kinds of deals. On an email today, I noticed that as a subject, they had stated, "Start Saving Your Money by Buying From Us!" I'm seeing that as another opportunity to compare now to then, meaning comparing today's practices to those of yesteryear.
Basically, in the earlier days, we didn't tend to think in terms of saving by buying, no matter who we might be buying from or at what price. For the most part, saving meant NOT buying. You saved up your money until you had enough to buy what you had in mind, and then you bought it when you felt the time was right and the price was OK. For the most part, we didn't buy on credit, though there were a few stores that would carry people on accounts. They expected to be paid weekly or monthly. There were no credit cards.
I think I'm seeing a trend in merchandise advertising in which the ad doesn't state the price you will be asked to pay for the items advertised; instead, the ad states what you will save by purchasing the item from this company. Indeed, often the ad will say, Save 10 percet, or save 20 percent. The ads would have you thinking not about what you are paying for the goods, but about your impressive total SAVINGS! The suggestion often is that you will save so much that you'll be able to purchase a lot more stuff that you never thought you could afford. They want you to be thinking not about how much you are spending, but how much you are saving as you buy. To an old-timer, this is weird stuff.
In our society we seem to take for granted a concept which we call "the full price" or the "regular price" for things we are buying. This has probably grown out of two other concepts -- "the wholesale price" and the "retail price" which includes the retail markup, which is how the retailer makes his living. Once we buy into the idea that items have a regular, established, full price, we are then ready to fall for the idea of a "sale price." The idea of a sale price leads us into the mindset which thinks in terms of how much I am saving when I buy this item, rather than how much I am spending to obtain it. Similar to a sale price is the concept of a "discount price," by which the seller supposedly agrees to make less profit in order to sell to us at a more attractive price. Of course we rarely know just what the seller's cost was, and we rarely have any idea of how much profit he is making on an item. Yet another similar weird thing we see today is the idea of a coupon, for getting a reduced price for things. It is almost as though the coupon is like money to spend. Where it gets its value, I don't know.
I notice that even in some transactions that were earlier considered to be negotiated price transactions, there are strategies now to establish the idea of a full regular price. In my earlier recollections, people who were out to buy a car or a truck would check out what the seller had for sale, and would listen to the seller's "asking price," then they would make an offer, and the "dealing" would continue until an agreement was worked out, or until one or the other person backed out of the deal. We still commonly deal this way in real estate transactions, but it seems to me that the auto industry is trying to get away from negotiated prices. I even noticed a car dealer a while back advertising "No Hassle Pricing! What you see is what you pay!" To an old-fashioned wheeler-dealer, that would be a real turnoff, giving the impression that this seller is just a hard-nosed cad who refuses to budge from his high prices.
I have this gripe with the TV cable industry. They never advertise what their service will cost you when the promotional prices expire. They advertise -- Get our service for $19.95 per month guaranteed for a full year. Save big! Then what? when "regular price" kicks in? $200 per month?!
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 06/11/2014