Last week, everywhere you looked, that was all you could see - "deals". 50% off this, 75% off that, buy one and get one free, all kinds of stuff to mislead the consumer. It was so tempting to get 50% off stuff, especially when everyone tells you that this is the time of the year to be shopping, the time of the year when the best deals are available. So I went out shopping too, thinking the deals would only be available on that day.
I found yesterday that Macys, the store that advertises and makes use of Black Friday to the maximum has another sale this weekend - with the same 50% off of course. So what were they advertising about last week? What made last week the best week to shop?
In fact, come to think of it, although Macys has good stuff, the pricing is very misleading. There is no "real" price on any item - its basically an auction model, where the goods come in before the beginning of each season (sales for the next season begins way before the season itself, off) at heavy prices. The people who are particular about wearing in season and the latest fashion trends and colors buy those at exorbitant prices. After a while, the same items get marked down, and they have a sale, perhaps putting a discount of 40%. If you are unlucky, you could be paying as much as 40% more for the same item if you went shopping just one day before the sale day. And what happens when the items dont go on sale even after 40% discount? Well, they get marked down lower still. Finally it hits clearance, and they usually cost between 5-10$ at that point. Of course, one has to realize that the ones that end up in clearance are the sizes that no one can wear, the patterns that no one liked, or the cuts that did not suit most people. So the trick to shopping well is to go after it is marked down, but before people have finished buying up all the good pieces. And that is why sales are so popular here..
Except... what does it mean when there is a sale every 10 days or so? Are they reducing the price of items every 10 days? Isnt that an indication that their items are way overpriced to begin with? And if the store is not going bust after all these sales, surely they are conning us into paying more than we ought to?
A programming class that I took at Columbia had this interesting problem we had to solve : We had to write code that could play scrabble - we all started out with an initial (random) set of letters. In each round, a new letter would come up for bidding, and all the teams could bid on this new letter to try and get the letter (and win the game by making a 7 letter word). So at each point, when a letter came up for bid, we had to decide what that letter was worth to us and bid accordingly. Through trial and error, we learnt that the only way to get what was valuable through an auction was to put in a bid that reflected the true value of the letter for us depending on the state of our game.
Of course, estimating true value was a difficult problem. We knew intuitively what letters were more valuable or less valuable. But putting a number on it was not easy. We explored all kinds of things to arrive at true value. We never reached the right equations, and our player did not win, ultimately. But it was a valuable lesson, because I am applying it while shopping at Macys now :) .. I look at each piece and decide whether the cost reflects its true value to me. If it does, I buy, and if it doesnt, I dump it. It has proved to be a valuable aid in helping avoid regrets.
Funny how programming lessons can come handy while shopping.
