Mall Jewelry Store ‘Sales’
Tip It!I’ve always been amused by the fact that mall jewelry stores seem to run perpetual sales, with pretty much everything selling for 70% off pretty much all the time, but this takes the cake… I just saw a Zales commercial on TV, and a bit of their fine print caught my eye… “Original prices may not have resulted in actual sales.”
In other words, they likely haven’t even tried to sell their wares for the ‘regular’ price. Rather, they just mark it way up before they mark it down. Apparently they’ve gotten in trouble for this sort of behavior at some point — why else would they run a disclaimer effectively admitting that the ‘deal’ that they’re offering you has been greatly exaggerated?
Published on December 20th, 2005 - 4 Comments
Filed under: Miscellany
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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December 20th, 2005 at 7:15 am
Welcome to the jewelry “business”. My experience here is that if you don’t know what they’re up to, you can REALLY get taken.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:14 am
This reminds me of a dry cleaners down the street which has “20% off everyday!” permanently written on their storefront.
As for jewelry, the only piece of jewelry I’ve ever gotten in a physical store instead of online is my wife’s engagement ring and that was only after extensive research and shopping around online and in stores. It was the only time I’ve ever seen a B&M jewelry store beat all of the online sellers for the same type and quality of merchandise … even with the perpetual 40-60% off!
December 20th, 2005 at 10:23 am
I have not done a whole lot of jewelry buying; our engagement ring came from a family hand me down, and the work done on it was a friend’s recommendation at a jeweler. Doing the sizing was much cheaper than the buying, I’d think…
December 20th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
My mom once told me that jewelry is marked up at least 300%, so when it’s 50% off, they’re still making a huge profit. We had friends who were jewelers so I assume that’s where she heard it from.