Friday May 13, 2005 Bizarre Promotions
Just as I was wondering when I would get an opportunity to muse on something I considered odd, last night at the supermarket while shopping, the opportunity presented itself in all its glory.The question that arose to me was the logic of some of the people who come up with promotional pricing. The item in question was washing powder tablets, not that this is necessarily relevant, but it does illustrate the point. Washing powder tablets in the UK are typically sold in boxes of 24 and boxes of 48, with a box of 48 costing slightly less than two boxes of 24 (economies of scale and all that).
However, when shopping yesterday, there was a special offer to buy two packs of 24 for £4. A box of 48 of the same product was on the shelf at £4.80, a 20% higher price for exactly the same product, the only difference being the number of boxes it came in. So, who is going to bother buying one of the boxes of 48 while this offer is on. No one.
So what does this mean to me as a consumer and IT person? Well, modern supermarkets run large systems to manage their supply chains and track spending patterns and trends. In this case, all of a sudden, the computers are going to see sales of boxes of 48 drop to zero (or at least they should 
).
What will be the consequence of this in terms of impact on the consumer? Hopefully there is some human involvement in the process that will result in common sense seeing the reason for the sudden decline in sales, and there won't be some computer automatically cutting back drastically on the supplies they order such that when the promotion is over, there are no boxes of 48 for the customers to buy because the computer thinks that no one wants to buy them any more.
( May 13 2005, 09:25:43 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]