"Deals" Gone Wrong - Times You Thought You Were Getting a Great Deal

chillybags on 28/12/2015 - 08:54

Hi All,

Came across a woman on boxing day in Target amongst the 50% off Christmas chocolate. She was being sneaky and snickering with her friend about the chocolate, and when I looked down I saw she had piled hundreds and hundreds of little 10g Lindt teddies into her basket: they were originally $0.85 each so down to $0.42. I quickly (and very easily) did the mental maths and realised that it equated to $4.20 per 100g. Anyone familiar with Lindt would know that you can get a 100g block for $2-2.50 on sale at the supermarket often. To give you an idea of the other sale items, I'd just purchased a 500g box of Lindor (slightly different chocolate but still nice Lindt) for $10 —> $2 per 100g. So obviously this woman was getting pretty screwed over and even if she specifically wanted the chocolate in teddy form she could easily have gotten a better deal (100g Lindt teddies were selling for $3).

So my question is: when have you gotten a "deal" and realised that it has gone horribly wrong? Were you able to return the items, or were you stuck with it? Or did you see someone else lose out trying to get a deal?

General Discussion

Comments

  • Davo1111 on 28/12/2015 - 09:06
    +12

    I negotiated a price at bing lee for a 320GB hard drive, for the same price a competitor was selling for 500GB. I was ecstatic and thanked the guy profusely.

    You win some, you lose some. I moved on.

  • kyle on 28/12/2015 - 09:14

    But the woman wanted 10g individually wrapped teddies? That's like buying fun size chocolates compared to a whole block. I personally prefer individually wrapped stuff too so they remain unopened until needed.

    • scrimshaw on 28/12/2015 - 09:38
      +4

      Yeah, for food items you can't generally compare price vs weight ratio if the packaging itself is the factor behind the pricing strategy.

      It's abit like buying 300ml cans of coke vs buying a carton of liter bottles. Of course the big bottles of coke will cost you much less per liter, but once you crack the bottle open the coke starts to go flat.

      • chillybags on 28/12/2015 - 16:35

        Yeh fair enough with the coke bottles vs cans, but i doubt anyone would finish only 10g of chocolate at a time and when they come in 100g blocks anyways (maybe 2-3 sittings worth of chocolate) plus they are regularly on sale and you can buy "fresh" ones as they come on sale instead of having to eat all these small ones before the expiring date.

  • slknv on 28/12/2015 - 10:08
    +3

    I recall a customer of mine 100% convinced it was ALWAYS cheaper to buy camera gear in hong kong (this was quite a few years ago), I bought my 450D locally and claimed GST TRS back on it and paid about $800, he paid $950 from HK and wasted a day shopping for it while over there.

  • KaTst3R on 28/12/2015 - 13:55

    I actually see value in having chocolates wrapped individually. I hate storing and looking at half eaten blocks of chocolate, it feels like something would crawl and live inside that bar if I leave it around long enough.

    • WT on 29/12/2015 - 12:13
      +1

      I dont eat a lot of it so no matter how small it is there will always be some left open. You can just use an air tight container…

  • Pharos5 on 28/12/2015 - 14:28
    +2

    Was buying diamond earrings for a gift and thought I was being savvy getting the salesperson to mark them down 40% after doing the whole "oh okay I might leave it for now" thing.

    They were 60% off later that week and you could probably even get them lower than that :(

    I give up trying to work out their cost prices.

    • Ughhh on 28/12/2015 - 21:33

      Jewellery have huge markups. Pawn shops are about 300%, probably more for brand new ones.

  • chipstss on 28/12/2015 - 23:09

    https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/221470
    Switched me off the plan to prepaid when it was supposed to renew.

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