Your inner bargain-hunter may have heard the news that Sports Authority’s liquidation sales in hundreds of stores across the country begin today. That doesn’t mean that you should run out and gather up workout clothes and sports gear right away, though, unless you have a gift card to use up, since it will only be valid through June 26. That’s because of the strange way that liquidation sales work, where the prices on everything are hiked up before they’re brought back down.
Let’s say that you have your eye on a pair of sneakers with a list price of $120. Because of the weird games retailers play with pricing, the sneakers might have rarely been for sale for their full price: maybe they were marked 30% off before the sale began. A liquidation sale means that merchandise that was on sale before liquidators took over gets marked back up to 100%, and then the price gradually falls. The liquidator will first mark items down to 10% off, then 20%, finally escalating to some actual deals that might even beat sale prices at competitors.
Why do they do this? First, because the “going out of business” sale draws customers like swarms of locusts, and those shoppers don’t necessarily know what everything used to cost. Second, the liquidators handling the sale are a separate company, and marking everything back to to the original price and then gradually lowering it is how they make money.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment