Carragee Consulting

WSJ article on baked in discounts

This article has a good explanation of how retail pricing has been changing to feed our psychological need to view our purchases as a “good deal”.  It has a number of good statistics too.

“In a 2012 presentation, Mr. Johnson, then still Penney’s CEO, said the company was selling fewer than one out of every 500 items at full price. Customers were receiving an average discount of 60%, up from 38% a decade earlier. The twist is they weren’t saving more. In fact, the average price paid by customers stayed about the same over that period. What changed was the initial price, which increased by 33%.”