Today I was talking to a person who’s business is very seasonal where all of his customers usually come around this time of year when the weather gets hot. The interesting thing was because he knows he will get more customers he tends to price his products higher as well. At first I was asking if this was simply due to a supply and demand scenario which made sense to me. However, he said no as it was simply based on the notion that for some reason people are willing to pay the higher prices as during this time of the year if they want to buy something then they will. Therefore, he may as well get more profit.

I was just thinking that must feel a little strange. For example, imagine doing something like offering an E-book where you originally sold it for a certain amount and because you know there is going to be an influx of customers then suddenly you increase the price. Like in this case, it didn’t really require you to do anything more or less. This is one of those things where probably a big shot would say you would be silly not to increase the price if you knew people will pay for it anyways.

However, I tend to think at this day and age information and can easily be found and if people are more aware of a company’s pricing tactic like this that the negative publicity from that is probably not going to be worth the few extra dollars you made. Unless this wasn’t exactly a long term business as you are simply looking to get in and out really fast I suppose. I personally think in a situation where if it doesn’t have anything to do with say an increase cost in doing business that your pricing should be fairly consistent as I know from a consumer point of view the word of mouth can end up costing the business more sales if people perceive it as like price gouging.

I heard an interesting comment today from a person who was interested in selling their property. While usually this is something that you would hire say a real estate agent to do she was specifically saying that she doesn’t want to use one because she sees how much money they make. She further emphasized how nowadays most people use the Internet to find a listing by themselves anyways and so she felt weird potentially giving someone so much money if people happen to be searching themselves for the property.

It’s kind of interesting as like in this case it had nothing to do on whether or not the service provided is a good value or if it produces the desired results that you are looking for. In that sense the reason to not do business is more personal I guess you can say. This makes me wonder that in certain business on whether or not it is better to not advertise how profitable or successful your business is for example so that you don’t automatically get placed into this negative category.

I suppose this is because the common perception is that a person who makes a lot of money must be in someway unethical or that automatically they must be taking advantage of you. Is that really a fair thing to say? I would say ultimately it should come down to value and whether or not you think the product or service you would be getting is worth the money.

It was interesting today as I was reading how a company sent all of its customers surveys that asked questions on how they felt about some potential changes that they were interested in implementing. Essentially, the change is big enough where it would affect everyone and so they want people’s feedback about it. Funny thing was people saw memos that indicated they have already decided what to do anyways and so for the most part people giving opinions are more for show.

Not a good thing to get caught doing. At the same time, I guess many business choose to do that to kind of show that they at least tried. Almost sounds like something you would normally only see in politics during election times huh? One of those sneaky business tactics that should give you an insight in terms of how they perceive you as a customer for you determine if you should do business with them I suppose.

This was kind of interesting I thought. I went into this video game store looking for a gift and for this store in particular I know they sell second hand items as well. So you always need to make sure that they aren’t selling you something used as new. To my surprise, when you looked at the shelf there didn’t seem to be any products labelled as “used” as oppose to “recycled” as you can see here:

What an interesting marketing tactic I thought to capitalize on people who want to say buy green without the negative perception that usually comes with buying used products. At the same time, I was wondering if this is borderline misleading though. Usually when I think of recycling tangible items I think of people breaking down the material to make something new out of it. Whereas in this case it is mostly repackaging the used item. For example, someone selling their used car and saying it is a recycled vehicle seems a little off. Will be interesting to see if it actually works for them and how well.

Today there was a funny scenario where a person was trying to sell a vehicle and it seemed like he went with the enthusiastic sale route. It seemed like as well when people asked him questions he seemed to have answered it pretty confidently. However, there were many times where the customer asked if the car had certain features where he said no as that is only on more expensive vehicles. However, there happened to be a sign that talked about the features and it did indicate the the car had them.

Very awkward situation I guess you can say huh? That’s usually a pet peeve of mine in any business where you go to a place only to find out that the people selling the items don’t really know it very well themselves. It’s interesting to me that companies often neglect to invest in people to become knowledgeable about what they sell too. Isn’t that a worthwhile investment? First impressions only happen once.