Holiday Shopping Dilemma

Now that we have, not one, but two Black Fridays from which to choose the question is “When should we buy?” In reality the question is more complex, isn’t it?

You know from experience that retailers continue to discount heavily throughout the holiday season, making it even more difficult to know when to buy. What’s at stake? Value for the dollar. This is especially true in difficult economic times when discretionary dollars are scarce.

Unfortunately, instead of helping us make informed decisions, retailers make it more difficult to decide when to buy. By ignoring our needs, indeed by making life more difficult for us, they lay open the door to tremendous customer dissatisfaction. Their pricing strategies leave us with questions like:

What is the true value of what I’m buying?
How can the price continue to drop when the product doesn’t change?
Were they trying to gouge me before?
What happens if the price drops after I make the purchase?
What extra work am I going to have to do to recover the price difference if I do buy early?
Is it even possible to recover the price difference?

Is it any wonder that we feel additional anxiety in an already stress-laden season? It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s apparently more counter-intuitive than I imagine, but if these retailers did a better job of touting the benefits of doing business with them so that we could readily see the value, they’d generate more sales (discounts reduce revenues), they wouldn’t need as many customers to be profitable, they’d create greater customer loyalty and they’d have a clearer picture of who their ideal customers are and what they value.

Now that’s a win for everyone!