Honest 'likes'

I was on Facebook for a minute today. I don’t like facebook, which is why I was only there a minute. While I was there I noticed a “like Walmart” advert. It said  that ‘liking’ Walmart would “score” me “everyday low prices”. Um. They have those anyway right? So ‘liking’ Walmart really only gets me more crap ads posted on my fb page, and spammed to anyone who happens to have friended me.

I dislike all the companies who have these types of promotions. Like us and get a coupon. Like us and be entered into a drawing -along with 240 million other people who fell for this- for something worth $3. The stores ‘look’ popular and don’t have to pay for advertising. The ‘liker’ doesn’t really benefit most of the time, and I suspect that they usually don’t really care about the store one way or the other. But ‘like’ is the only way to get the coupon, which they then have to print before they can forget to use it. Personally, I wish companies would just offer fair pricing to begin with.

There used to be a department store in the DC area – The Hecht Company – waaaay back when, it was reasonably upscale and popular. Somewhere along the line it became the store that sent out glossy sale booklets through the mail every week. Every week, a booklet. Not a 4 page flier, a 20+ page magazine sized book. To 100,000 or more local residents. Imagine the postage on that, and keep that idea in mind for later.

Now what annoyed me about these sale books was that every week they claimed everything in the store was 50% off. They put in ‘save an extra 20%’ coupons for every department in the store. The way I see it, if you can afford to take 50% or more off everything that often, you over priced it to begin with. Plus, if you do that every single week, it is not a sale, that IS your regular price, so the 50% off stuff was a lie. The sale was 20% off if you actually used the coupon. Forget the coupon, pay regular price.

Because I felt like the ads were a glossy red lie, I refused to shop at the Hecht Company. I was also annoyed that they killed all those trees every week to send out the same basic false sale. Now, eventually the Hecht Company went bankrupt. I suspect I was not the only person who noticed that nothing was really 50% off “regular” price because “regular” was the 50% off price. I also suspect that the cost of printing and mailing that fake sale paper every single week ate deeply into the bank account. 

This is what I mean by ‘charge a fair price’. A store has overhead, whether brick or cyber. Pricing has to cover overhead. Stock, space, electric, phones, shipping supplies, business license fees, employees, whatever you use is overhead. So the product has to cost at least enough to pay for itself and the work that went into getting it on the shelf.

 No one goes into business to only cover overhead, so pricing also need to produce a bit of profit. If the average selling price of Widgets is $1.00 and Widgets cost you .75 to get on the shelf, profit is twenty-five cents. If your widgets only cost you fifty cents, you can either sell them for less, and possibly sell more of them, or you can sell them for the going rate and make more profit that way. You can sell your product for whatever price you want. If I like your price, I’ll buy it. If you sell it for $1 and I don’t like your service or trust your store, and Joe’s corner store sells it for $1.25, I’m going to Joe’s. It isn’t all about price. It’s about service, integrity and fairness.

Now you may wonder how I got here from facebook and the whole “like us for rewards” thing. I don’t trust all those coupon-induced ‘likes’. When I see a store with 2342342987864643 ‘likes’ on fb, I think of those Hecht Company ads. When I see a small local company who has 500 likes, that I believe. 500 people who didn’t have to be bought to want to share a store with their friends on fb makes me think I should check that store out. 500,000 who share a store with quirky merchandise I can believe too. But I don’t believe that millions of people were so thrilled with ‘ordinary’ that they felt compelled to share it with every one.

I can believe that 804,916 people ‘like’ Wawa. If you go to Wawa’s fb page, they do have a ‘like us for deals’ but they don’t have that plastered everywhere. It’s on their fb page, so to find it you have to go there or see it because one of your friends ‘liked’ it.  Those are genuine ‘likes’. 

There is some advertising on this blog and it is likely to be content related. Therefore either Walmart or Wawa may end up being advertised here. If I had my druthers, it'd be Wawa, because Wawa is awesome. Go there. Get coffee. I drive past half a dozen coffee shops and convenience stores to get to Wawa's coffee.  Try it, or try a hoagie. Both are excellent.  I bet you'll be willing to go find Wawa's fb page and like them too.