_portrait.jpg){kind=link}
Was he actually thinking that those $450 were just gifted by the exporter?
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
899 points (99.1% liked)
Leopards Ate My Face
8745 readers
1554 users here now
Rules:
- The mods are fallible; if you've been banned or had a post/comment removed, please appeal.
- Off-topic posts will be removed. If you don't know what "Leopards ate my Face" is, try reading this post.
- If the reason your post meets Rule 1 isn't in the source, you must add a source in the post body (not the comments) to explain this.
- Posts should use high-quality sources, and posts about an article should have the same headline as that article. You may edit your post if the source changes the headline. For a rough idea, check out this list.
- For accessibility reasons, an image of text must either have alt text or a transcription in the post body.
- Reposts within 1 year or the Top 100 of all time are subject to removal.
- This is not exclusively a US politics community. You're encouraged to post stories about anyone from any place in the world at any point in history as long as you meet the other rules.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service apply.
Also feel free to check out:
Icon credit C. Brück on Wikimedia Commons.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The fact that the distinction of who the fees actually get connected from matters so much to people is so crazy to me. It doesn't matter who the fees are collected from, you're paying them regardless. If the exporter pays them they will just raise the price you pay to cover the cost. It also amazes me that so many people who were in favor of tariffs somehow think they wouldn't raise prices even though that's literally the entire fucking point of tariffs. They raise the prices of foreign goods to give domestic goods that cost more an advantage.
That's a really big issue, tbh. People don't get how prices work. You see the same with promotions/sales. A lot of shops/companies will often put their products on sale for 25%, 50% or even more off. And people think they will actually save that amount of money. Instead of realizing that in most cases the sales price is the regular price, and the regular price is inflated by the sales price amount so that if the product is sold the seller still makes the same margins.
In a former job the company started expanding to Asia, and we got a sales guy from Singapore to represent us in Asia. He said that if we aren't selling with at least 60% rebate, we have no chance of selling stuff in Asia. So we created a new price list for Asia with all the prices tripled.
JCPenney tried to move to a more transparent pricing structure in 2012 and it lost them nearly a billion dollars.
So sad when companies try to do the right thing, the consumer market is too dumb to appreciate it.
Regardless of whether you call it a sale, regular, or inflated prices aren’t you still saving money by buying when it’s relatively low?
I’m aware of the psychology of marketing and the trickery of things like Black Friday. But unless the sale price is literally the same as it was when not on sale, then I’m not following.
Edit: in your Asian rebate example, is the idea that those customers want to see a high price and then get a big rebate when they buy it? That’s fascinating! (And has probably worked on me too)
If the model is high rebates at some times (e.g. an article costs €50 instead of €100 for part of the time), then you do save money buying when it's at €50.
But you have to remember that €50 is the price at which the seller would usually sell the product. That's the price that their price calculation says that it should be sold at. Otherwise they'd not be making profit.
So the alternative model is to always sell the article at €50.
Or to put it differently: The seller does the price calculation and comes up with €50 being the price where they would need to sell it to make profit and the price that the customers would still buy it at. It's the optimal price, and the price they should be going with.
Instead, they sell it for €100, so they can discount it to €50 and put a big "-50%" sticker onto it. Hardly anyone who has the choice buys at €100, everyone waits for the sale, when it's put to €50. And then more people buy, because they think they have made a massive deal, because they have gotten a €100 item for only €50. They are going to tell all their friends about it, it might even make it into news articles or stuff like that, and then more people buy.
The other option, which is illegal in some countries but legal in others, is to just fake the "full" price all together. The product is always offered at €50, but the sticker says "~~€100~~ -50% super sale!"
You can see stuff like that on Aliexpress. Pick some article that has a 50% rebate during some sales holiday (e.g. Black Friday). Then look at the article a week later, and in almost all cases the non-rebated price next week will be the same as the rebated price during Black Friday.
People just love being lied to. It's really sad.