what caused stores to abandon the 1930 to 1970 sears selling method of identifying products as good/ better/ best.
target, all the box stores, and wal mart seem only to sell one product line (cheapest) in many cases.
did the manufacturers cause the change by not making better products, or are the sellers afraid to id the better ones????
Replies
funny you mention this - i just noticed HD was doing just that - at least on sump pumps and something else I just bought which I can't remember ... literally had 3 pumps lined up next to each other labeled good/better/best (or maybe superior)
by not making better products, or are the sellers afraid to id the better ones
Well, the old marketing adage (used to) be, the best way to sell excrement was to repackage it as something needful, like fertilizer.
I'm thinking it's not the sellers "not wanting" to label the "the better," so much as not having to label something as "worse."
National buying tends to "round off" distinctions within a grade of products, too. If I'm buying for 20,000 store outlets, I choose the 1/3hp garbage disposal on the best price point the mfgr/distributer gives me, not on stocking a good/better/best range of 1/3hp units. That last, of course, assumes that the buyer even presumes that there is a g/b/b in 1/3 versus just moving up to 1/2hp (which may be all that the buyer is told by the rep).
There's some shelf/storage space versus turnover calculations in there, too. The bean counters are second-guessing the buyers and vice versa, which pretty much eliminates choices on a g/b/b basis. Leaving only what "turns over" on the shelf. What's the "best" product Acme Big Box sells? The one we sell, it's always moving off our shelf. Which becomes chicken-egg-chicken; but nobody much cares in the larger sense, they're busy trying to get another $0.0001 out of each sale in the short term. No worries about the label on the product--it's the price to buy that matters. Retailing is a minor problem put on the PFK running the store.