|
asdf32 posted:Separately their pricing has never made sense. I’ve never had anything ring up for the price on the tag Macy’s. I walk to the register prepared to pay X and walk out paying way less than X. That doesn’t seem too smart. On the other hand JCP tried to end this and it killed them. Kohl's does this as well. It's an old mid-tier sales tactic. They control the sticker price. So they jack up the prices on everything 100%, and then rotate everything through 25-75% off on a cycle to keep you coming back and feeling like you're getting some kind of deal even though you're not. Cicero posted:A nonmagnetic fridge? Such a thing exists? I bought a fancy fridge like 2 years ago. The front is non-magnetic, but the sides are magnetic. This keeps our kitchen looking clean, but boring.
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2020 02:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 18:56 |
|
|
cat botherer posted:It seems like requiring staff to lock/unlock cabinets every time a customer wants socks or some low-value hygiene product does not jive with wanting to reduce staffing. It's not about reducing staffing. It's about closing stores in places/markets where they feel they can't raise prices. It's reverse gentrification. When they install that poo poo it's a signal to anyone who can go to another location that they should go to another location. You see this a lot in Chicago. Stores in "black areas," have poo poo locked up. Store a half mile down the road, same chain, doesn't. Actual stores with competitive prices that exist to serve customers in that same "black area," also aren't locking poo poo up. It's not about shrink, not about staffing. It's large chains negging their customers to go to the more affluent location up the road where they can raise prices more due to weeding out customers that can't travel as far. They can't just close a store that's doing good business. That would look weird. So they do this thing where they slowly turn the store into a prison until sales volume and profit dwindles enough that they have an excuse to close the store, sit on the lot as real estate, and then flip later. If you're a large retailer in the US at this point, there are no volume plays. You've basically maxed out. The transactions are the transactions. So what happens when a large retailer maxes out volume is they start heading the other way toward maximizing per-transaction profit. So they start trying to do these gambits where they take out the stores in the places where customers are getting the best value. These are otherwise profitable stores, and so they need an excuse. The recent acceptable excuse is shrink, and it turns out the retailers control shrink. So there's a predictable cycle of self-checkout to increase shrink leading to poo poo locked in cases leading to store closures. Voila, all the stores in affluent areas that can handle price hikes stay open while the ones that actually serve communities get axed. ErIog fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Nov 13, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2023 03:27
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Why wouldn't they just raise prices? Large businesses want to pick their customers, and it's more efficient to take out the bottom tier of the transactions rather than try to foist price hikes evenly on the entire customer base. Netflix did this a year ago with the password sharing policy change. They saturated their market with lower prices to get people in the door. Now with everyone in the door, they want the customers who are willing to pay more to stay. This allows them to hike their prices substantially more in the long term while reducing overhead serving people who can't pay as much. It isn't a very good business decision, but it sounds amazing to investors. On the way up, every company wants to make volume plays like Google or Microsoft. Once they reach their goals they want to pivot to being Apple, even if it means the business dies long term. No C-suite rear end in a top hat ever got punished for chasing profit too doggedly. Investors will accept the death of a company through chasing profit. They will not accept consistent solid returns with nonexistent growth. This is why no good retailer and no good service can exist long term in the US. You get these boom/bust cycles with absurdly low prices to corner markets on the way up that then get followed by more and more desperate attempts to squeeze consumers on the way down. Very very few companies are content to put up with the overhead that saturation and volume provides. The companies that do persist tend to be in oligolopoly positions in the market where the price-fixing gives them freedom to do this. US cell phone carriers are like this. There's a consistent boom/bust cycle with MVNO's where they either go out of business or get folded into the main company. The MVNO's manage all the overhead of maintaining the service, and then the cell phone carriers get to onboard the customers they think have potential to be upsold. They're filtering customers. For brick and mortar retailers you can't filter the customers the same way. You need to get the least profitable stores to close, and the current mechanism for doing that is making them a terrible experience for consumers. They want you to drive half a mile up the road to pay 20 cents more at a different location. They don't want you to buy the poo poo locked up in the cases. They can't raise prices on that poo poo locked up in the cases because they have price competition in that location. They have less price competition up the road. ErIog fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 14, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 03:37
|
|
|
Oh drat, it turns out the retail theft claims were promulgated by retailers in bad faith. Who could have possibly seen that coming? Gee, I wonder if those claims were used as a basis of business decisions that involved shuttering price-competitive locations through draconian anti-shrink mitigation in order to get people to shop at stores in less price-competitive areas. Who can say? Baronash posted:What on earth? This is an absolutely bizarre reading of Netflix's strategy. Netflix wasn't trying to reduce its subscriber base, it was attempting the exact opposite. They saw people who shared a password from someone else's account as potential subscribers, and tried to capture some of them by removing the ability to easily share accounts. If they were just looking for the richest subscribers, they wouldn't have spent the last several years adding multiple price tiers (including their ad-supported plan just last year) to attract subscribers in every income bracket. I don't think anyone but Netflix can speak to how successful that has been, but it clearly isn't compatible with the strategy you claim they're employing. Your view of this doesn't make sense on paper. Netflix kept ratcheting prices on the service until it was painful to them, and then after that, took the step of kicking off "free riders." You can't both raise prices and make a volume play in the market at the same time. That really doesn't make sense. People who never bothered to buy in when it was cheaper are suddenly going to buy now that it's more expensive and access is cut off? Meanwhile.. torrenting still exists. It's madness. Cutting off the free riders was investor-facing virtue signaling. Netflix was trying to ladder up the market from basic mass consumer to premium. It was the only play they had left that made sense. They'd stripped every market they could access. No growth possible for actual users. So they went after their whales. ErIog fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Dec 14, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 05:45
|
|
|
Fork of Unknown Origins posted:People who could access it via someone else’s account absolutely might decide it is worth paying for themselves once that is no longer an option. Whether the price is higher or not. So yes, you can make a volume play by making people sign up for their own account if they want to continue service while also increasing prices. You’re right that you’ll see some drop in subscribers from the increased price, so if their only goal was to have the most subscribers possible it wouldn’t make sense, but that’s not their goal and the impact from ending sharing seems to have outweighed the impact from the cost increase. Baronash posted:Well done ignoring the post you quoted, I guess. They spent the last few years adding price tiers, including the ad-supported one with the intent of grabbing customers who otherwise would find their service too expensive. This is the exact opposite of what you're claiming. If they were trying to get rid of their lower-income customers, they wouldn't have introduced that ad-supported tier just last year. No, that's not actually what happened. You talk about tiers, but ignore the fact that what bought you full Netflix before now buys you a lower tier. They did add tiers. That's fine. Those tiers weren't actually price-competitive. This is why I talk about it in terms of the model they're actually chasing. There isn't, of course, any significant real overhead to more users on the service. That's not the actual opportunity cost in their calculation. The actual opportunity cost is the upselling. They want to kick everyone off the service that is less likely to be able to be upsold. Otherwise they have to go report in their reports that they've got so many millions of users not paying that they have no plan to get money from. They liked those free users when the wanted the user counts above all else. Now that they want more money from each user, those free-riders are a big problem. Go take a look at this price history for the service: https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes What once bought you a full standard Netflix subscription now buys you Netflix w/ ads. Cost of every other meaningful tier has gone way up. This meant free-riders cost them more money as time went on due to being considered "lost sales." So, of course, with that perspective they start chasing the non-paying demo. They don't cost anything, meaningfully, but the more of them you can kick off or convert improves their numbers greatly either way. The non-paying user either gets kicked out of the statistics, improving revenue per-user -or- converted to paying. Netflix is not a stable company. They tank within the next 5 years, and are likely bought out by Paramount. ErIog fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Feb 16, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2024 05:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 18:56 |
|
|
Baronash posted:This is a complete 180 from what you originally claimed: That's not a 180, and the link I posted proves you wrong. The only time they ever added a cheaper tier was the ads tier at $1 less than what standard Netflix (w/o ads) used to cost. Every other time what they did was charge users more and more, and then eventually buckle to demand for better pricing by giving a worse version of the service. They're not trying to attract every segment of the market with that pricing. They're specifically concentrated on making everyone pay more and telling users that won't buy-in for less than $7/month to gently caress off. Price of service on every other tier has doubled, and the content selection has gotten worse. The history of the tier changes and price changes shows a consistent effort to squeeze existing users, and then now, to kick even more off to make it look like they're growing. What's actually happening is Netflix is declinining, trying to hide the decline by pumping $/user, and expects to somehow ride this out. We've seen this pattern before. It's what happens to companies that had leveraged buy-outs. In this case, though, it's just self-inflicted.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2024 02:29
|
|