Over the holiday weekend, I caught a Dodge commercial on TV. It happened to be from one Melloy Dodge in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was your typical car commercial with a loud announcer's voiceover highlighting the unusual and amazing (always "amazing"!) deals on new cars. You better hurry or you'll miss the special deal.
This particular commercial was advertising a full 80% off MSRP! To be honest, that 80% figure is the only reason the commercial caught my attention as I am thoroughly immune to stupid commercials. How could that be? Was Melloy going out of business? Even if they were, no new car is ever 80% off unless it's a scam, like say a stolen or flooded vehicle.
It didn't take long to hear it was indeed a scam. The particular foul? You may have already guessed- "MSRP" had a special definition just for this commercial. Instead of the standard "manufacturer's suggested retail price" to which everyone is accustomed, they slipped in their fabricated definition of "manufacturer's suggested retail profit". I nearly spit out my coffee at the audacity. Yet one wonders, does such blatant nonsense work as a marketing gimmick? Is there anyone who actually thought this was a real deal?
Personally, I try hard not to do business with people or companies that operate this way.
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I don't know if I mentioned this in a post but Pizza Hut once had a promotion where you could get two toppings for the price of one. Most people assumed that mean if you got, say, 200 g of cheese, you got 200 g of cheese and 200 g of bacon. But if you ordered the deal, you got 100 g of cheese and 100 g of bacon. You weren't getting anything extra.
ReplyDeleteI got pissed at Radio Shack once. If you applied for their card in the store you got $10 off your purchase. What they don't tell you verbally but its in the fine fine fine print, there was a $20 fee to get the card, billed on the first statement.
There was a radio station in Detroit that had a contest for $1 million. Wow. Huge. In what amounted to radio fine print, they note it's $100,000 in a mutual fund that would be $1 million by the time you retired in 50 years, assuming xyz.