I think it’s so obnoxious when I go into a little shop and nothing has a price tag. I hate it with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Are you seriously gonna make me ask you about the price of every little thing I might consider purchasing? Or would you prefer that I bring a bunch of stuff to the register and then decide if I actually want it as you ring it up? And it honestly doesn’t matter if I can afford it (although the lack of clearly labeled prices are particularly rude to people who maybe can’t). No matter how much money I have I will never feel good about getting ripped off so the asking price will always be a factor.
I was recently in a local needlepoint supply store where they had nothing labeled. Needlepoint supplies vary wildly in price. You can get thread for a dollar or for $20. Canvases can cost 5 bucks or hundreds. From their website I saw that this store had needle minders (little decorative magnets to hold your needle when you take a break, they usually look like enamel pins but with magnets instead of the pin and clasp). Well they had $7 needle minders and $75 needle minders. So someone will wander in and see a cute 1 inch Snoopy magnet, think it’s a cute impulse purchase and then get hit with $75 + tax and have to either smile and go along with it or have to back out. It’s just a piss poor customer experience.
The implication is “if you’re too poor to risk spending dozens or potentially hundreds of dollars on an overpriced niknak, then you’re too poor to shop here.”
Yeah. It feels needlessly antagonistic. I don’t think that’s the intention but 🤷🏾
The intention is that they can fool careless shoppers into putting things in their baskets without thinking about prices (or feeling inhibited by them), and then by the time they get to the checkout counter they’d feel too embarrassed to put items back or they already feel to attached to them.
The thing is, that clearly only works on people with enough expendable income to A), put things in their basket without knowing the price; and B), go ahead and buy it anyway just to save face when you get to the counter and find out how overpriced it is.
For anyone with less wealth, it would either create a very embarrassing situation for them when they get to the checkout counter and find out they can’t afford their stuff, or they’d simply not put anything in their basket anyway without knowing how much it costs (which would require asking someone, and people at these kinds of stores tend be very pretentious and act like you’re being rude when you ask about the price of something; as if if price matters at all to you then you don’t deserve to be there).
In other words, it’s to keep poor people out while bamboozling moderately wealthy people out of their money.