The whole point is to take your time, encouraging you to continue down the sales funnel for fear of wasting your time by disengaging. It’s designed that way on purpose
It’s also there to enable them to use dynamic pricing. If their sales and marketing team has you pegged as a price insensitive buyer you get gouged. If you have no brand loyalty and are highly price sensitive then you get a competitive price.
Or the item they are selling has MAP pricing from the manufacturer, and calling the small business number on the website you are visiting will actually yield you a far lower price than advertised online by other stores. But you can just continue to assume all websites are Amazon, until they actually are, and the fiction you just wrote becomes reality.
I mean in theory that might work, but I have yet to see an actual example of a store that gives you a substantially lower price compared to advertised prices when you call them... maybe i'm not shopping in the right places
I'm not sure if it's still true, but at least in the past, you could call to get surprisingly good pricing on OLED or Plasma TVs and other home theater equipment from a handful of suppliers/longtime advertisers on enthusiast sites like AVS Forum. I remember one was Cleveland Plasma and another was just "Dave".
The process always felt a little opaque, and I'm sure AVS Forum had a vested interest in keeping these advertisers around, but those guys were great about answering my questions and would quote well-below even the sales prices at major retailers. We still have 3 of the 4 TVs we purchased from them over the years.
That said, I would not have been comfortable going ahead with the whole transaction if not for the hundreds of pages of other users interacting with those suppliers. They had basically become part of the AV ecosystem.
The trust and knowledge base built up from participating in these niche communities is one thing that I think we've really lost as Reddit and Discord have largely replaced web forums.
Also, if you're on the West Coast, Video Only is an excellent local retailer, and pretty much the only time that "inquire within for pricing" has been worth it.
...huh, thank you! I'm in WA where Video Only has a presence, will definitely check them out!
And yes i'm gonna sound like a bitter old man but i prefer internet forums for a lot of more obscure topics, and have started going back to them (the ones that still exist anyway). Reddit's algorithm prioritises recency which means it's hard to get in-depth discussion. A lot of hobby-focused subreddits are just full of people posting their shiny new purchase, but the forum equivalent usually has years-long threads discussing techniques, etc.
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u/GammaFan 5h ago
The whole point is to take your time, encouraging you to continue down the sales funnel for fear of wasting your time by disengaging. It’s designed that way on purpose