They have been doing this ever since I can remember. I recall that they allegedly tried to convince the shopper that it is ‘50%’ or ‘80%’ off. A few times I think it was ‘90% off’. Kudos to Quebec for having the courage to investigate and prosecute. I don’t think it will change much, however. Once, I had a clerk tell me ‘Don’t buy it now, tomorrow it will be 50% off’. He showed me the schedule of ‘price reductions’ for it for the next 12 months. If I waited eight weeks, it would be 75% off.
, Canadian Tire admitted liability for five of the products under investigation, including Henckels and Cuisinart knife sets,
Ah yes, the classic knife sets that are always $800 but 60% off or whatever.
That’s like industry standard at all box shops, always on discount for never full price.
The office concluded Canadian Tire had attempted to convince consumers that sale items were on deep discount by including an artificially inflated regular price on its advertising material.
Analysis of sales data showed that the products in question were rarely sold or advertised at the so-called regular price.
Under the agreement reached between the parties, Canadian Tire admitted liability for five of the products under investigation, including Henckels and Cuisinart knife sets, Lagostina and Heritage cookware, and a Dewalt cordless drill.
Canadian Tire can choose to be less obvious by advertising at the “regular price” more. Or by showing a lower regular price. Or continue this practice because $1.3M doesn’t hurt their profits.
Annnnd how much did they make? If it was 500k then great, a decent fine. If they mad millions during that time the fine should be higher, and the execs thrown in jail
Thats the beauty of doing it this way. It obscures the data so they can’t easily determine how much that specific trick influenced their profits.
Then they should also be fined for lack of transparency
they can’t easily determine how much that specific trick influenced their profits
Why should the fine be based on that?
Because they’re fining based on the legality of one specific trick, so it makes sense to dis-incentivise that specific trick by fining the entire profit made off that specific trick (plus some).
But you can’t quantify how much that trick earned them. How many customers went to Canadian Tire to buy that item, and then also bought others things while they were there? Would those customers have gone to Canadian Tire otherwise without that “sale”? Were they incentivized to spend even more because they thought they were saving money with that “sale”?
You responded to someone saying it’s really difficult to quantify by asking why they should even base the fine off this quantification. I explained why, and your response is, “yeah but it’s too hard to quantify.” No shit Sherlock.
My point was, why does that matter? They profited from false advertising; fine their total profits.
Sure, that’s an easier way of doing it. I don’t really have a problem with that except that it can easily kill a business to fine their total profits if the period is long enough.
I’m confident someone has done a price model comparing doing these “fake sales” vs. “real sales” vs. “no sales”, ergo it is possible to quantify the damages. Smart/big businesses don’t make decisions without doing the math first and then testing the price strategy, and that diligence could have been used against them to determine damages.
Couple weeks ago they had a 20% cashback with $10 off $80 sale that stacked. These types of sales is really the only time I shop there given how bad their usual prices are. I had to add some filler items to get to $80 but I was close anyways, they cancelled 1 of my items twice due to the website showing wrong stock amounts. This was in addition to it website barely being useable to begin with.
I really want to like Canadian Tire for what it once was, in addition to it being the only general hardware accessible to many rural Canadians but they make it really hard.
They used to return 5% of purchase price if you paid cash. This was to avoid charges by credit card companies.
Now it’s fuck all.
Meh. I try to avoid Crappy Tire as much as I can. I haven’t bought a product there in the past 20 years that wasn’t broken inside the package, or broke about a couple of minutes after opening the package. The shit they sell is so cheap, it’s ridiculous.
Chinese Tire would be more accurate.
Slams desk
THANK YOU!
I shop there on the regular and have never encountered this, I actually trust their quality significantly more than other similar stores.
In my area, if you want a $9 tool, you have to push a red button to get some pissed off teen to open the case, then they perp walk you to the front of the store.
I stopped going there after they mounted a set of winter tires on my car and didn’t balance them. The brand has literally become lore in Canada for second best, only frequented by Boomers now.
No problem buying better tools at Princess Auto.
Importantly, no customers were overcharged and the matter is now concluded.
Arguable, all things considered.
Arguably the customers who paid full price were certainly overcharged.
This feels too low.
Store count times times products times customers is way bigger than this
Interesting to see this when I just posted about Memory Express doing the same thing last week. I don’t think MemEx does business in QC but could be wrong about that. Would love for this shit to be investigated and punished across all areas of the market.
Fuuuuck. You had to ruin memory express for me? Where else do I go now that isn’t some shitty best buy for PC hardware…
And I don’t mean online retailer either. Sometimes I really need same day shit and to go in store.