I’d guess they don’t actually want to sell you a desk. They are probably in the business of selling hundreds of desks for offices, and this is their way of keeping out the small purchases that they aren’t targeting.
There’s an art supply store Michaels, they don’t list so much as a paint brush price on their site. This combined with their incessant need to ask me for my email every time I buy even one tiny thing at their store, ensures that I’m never going there again. From what I understand the employees get in trouble if they don’t ask and get emails which is bullshit
I just looked and everything has listed prices on their site. I thought it was weird you said they don’t list paint brushes cause I buy them from there somewhat frequently.
I use the Michael’s and joann’s apps for the coupons cause almost everything in those stores is overpriced. But the coupons are usually worth it.
Same with certain home improvement companies that hope once you’re on the line, they can close the sale there and then.
I swear they must make all their money off people who don’t want to think about what the job involves, and just hand over a chequebook.
The water softener from Costco is £500, the one from ScrewFix is £400, but I’m curious how much the one from NameBrand is.
NameBrand website “Well, it can vary a lot depending on how complicated…”
Forum posts: “£2k including fitting and a year’s salt, £1500 for the unit”
(Which isn’t an insane price to just have it sorted, I just hate the bollocks excuses when everyone magically still comes out around £2k)
The physical staircase will cost me about £1000, then a few days of skilled labour for someone to fit.
I wonder how much one of those “we’ll just handle it” companies in the back of the sunday supplement could do it for…Oh, that’s 15 times the price, wonderful.
I get what your saying and obviously overpaying by 15x, like in your example is a terrible idea but, I will say, overpaying by a much smaller amount to save time is sometimes worth it.
One thing your example does not do, and its something most people don’t do is factor in how much your time is worth. Is spending an extra $500, for example, worth as much as multiple hours of your time?
I absolutely agree.
Honestly, if NameBrand posted their prices, I might have considered them, as once my time organising/plumbing (or paying a plumber) is factored in, the difference isn’t so massive.
I just loathe the principle of having to get a quote for even the basic device in a box!
I moved last year. I looked into so many companies that drop off a box for later pickup. Only one of them (U-Haul) published their prices and they were very affordable.
I agree, I pretty much won’t do “Contact Us for Pricing” unless it’s construction work or something, but man, have you seen the Uhaul moving box in person?
It’s a wooden pallet with wobbly plywood walls and a tarp on it. It looks like something you’d see in a homeless camp.
I’d do it again but damn, the price definitely matches the quality.
i have one amazon account i’m locked out from because i forgot the name i used to sign up for it (there are numerous ways i could’ve written it and they only gave me three attempts) and another one that’s blocked because i incorrectly filled my credit card details while ordering a gift card and about to just create a third one because they want me to call them and talk to support for both cases.
how so? it would just offer me a list of possible combinations of name/surnames.
i could’ve written them in four different languages (english, ukrainian, russian, polish), and that’s not even including transcription into latin for ukrainian and russian.
and also they don’t even say if they expect name-surname or surname-name ordering, so the check is fundamentally broken and impossible to pass reliably.
also the password managers usually don’t save cvv and even if they did I’d have to disable that feature because I’m using dynamic cvv that refreshes every hour
it would just offer me a list of possible combinations of name/surnames.
The password manager suggests the details you saved for amazon, usually at sign-in. It doesn’t just show you a list of everything you ever typed into a form field.
I "walk away" online as well.
"Sign in to get price".
Guess what, it's never a mind blowing low price. It's like $5.00 less than normal. Hidden prices are never a deal.
Costco online is the only exception to this, for me. You need a paid account to shop there anyway, so I’m willing to jump through that hoop most of the time. It’s still a pain, and I’ve definitely closed the tab a few times on Costco when I was pretty sure I was getting a better deal somewhere else.
There actually can be bs from a manufacturer where a site cannot list an item below their MSRP so in order to do a sale they have to do the bs like “add to cart to see price” or making you sign in. Sure sometimes it’s not an amazing deal but it can often be the lowest price you can find an item because they aren’t allowed to advertise a price that low.
Edit: See comment below to learn about MAP “minimum advertised price” which is different from MSRP “manufacturer suggested retail price” leaving my above comment alone with its inaccuracy so that the below comment continues to make sense and you can learn as I did.
MAP (minimum advertised price) is often different from MSRP, but otherwise this comment is correct.
In some industries, like RVs or auto parts, the vast majority of products have a MAP. The manufacturers also have bots that scan the internet for MAP violations, and they’ll blacklist a vendor if they don’t fix the price within a day or two. (Which is really annoying when there’s a false positive and I get blamed for it.)
I think it’s partly so high volume vendors can’t put smaller vendors out of business by just reducing their margins as much as possible, and it’s partly because the manufacturer doesn’t want their products to look like they’re really cheap. Customers feel better about finding a “great deal” on an “expensive” product.
Thankfully not too many, Often I’ll find some things are marked but not everything in smaller stores like some grocery, variety stores, second hand shops etc.
I buy a lot of things for work and if I can find a company that has the price listed I go with them over the one that makes me contact sales for a quote almost every time
Timber merchants in the UK. The ones that don’t list prices are cheaper. Largely because they base their prices on the current price of wood. Those that advertised prices need a higher margin to tolerate fluctuations in the price of wood.
Especially considering that most of the time you’ll sit on hold which can be awhile
If the company says “call” I ain’t even going to bother because my 30 minutes is more valuable to me than whatever price they could say 99.9% of the time
This could be a great use for a voice AI chat bot connected to your phone line. Prompt it with something like,
“You’re on a phone call to [Widgets Inc] to get a price quote for a [box of premium widgets]. You’ll probably be put on hold to speak with the next available sales representative. Just wait until you get a person on the line. Then, ask for the price and immediately start negotiating for a better price. Use whatever strategy you want but never agree to whatever price they offer. Keep coming up with more ridiculous reasons that they should give you an even better price.”
Then dial the phone, turn it over to the chat bot, and wander off to go do more important things.
Sometimes you can blame the partnership agreement for that. Some manufacturers will have a MAP (minimum advertised price) and the distributor would be in violation of their contract if they showed it publicly.
Though that just shifts to being a manufacturer problem with the same result. Just saying it may not be the distributor being weird about pricing.
Yes. It infuriates me that members of my species keep these places in business. They should all be out of business since absolutely no one should be buying their unpriced shit.
I mean you are talking about stuff where someone hires someone to make something that does not exist yet? totally get that. you are not buying so much as hiring someone in that case. if it exists and does not need to be modified though it should be able to be priced.
Yeah. Like a $1,900-$4,800. I’ve seen that a lot because even w/o custom work there’s a lot of options or additional features/drawers they can add in. Sizes, etc.
That happens at my job, we’re instructed to not give prices cause it depends on a number of factors but I do give starting prices and make sure to repeat at least three times that’s they’re the minimums and there is no upper limit cause it depends on those factors. It’s free to have one of my licensed inspectors go out and do his thing to provide an exact number anyways. The number includes taxes too so there’s no surprises.
I wanted to get a quote on a mini split, or ductless A/C, the HVAC company said they can send someone over to review the location and give me an estimate.
I’m not asking for a full system, I literally just need an A/C drilled into my wall, there is no need for someone actually visit my home to give a guess.
say you want the condenser unit placed on your roof or backyard. the routing would be completely different. Say you have an unfinished basement vs they have to remove and replace a shit ton of drywall. completely different. the unit itself is a static price. the conditions of installing the unit are a huge factor. is it on a drywall wall or are your walls all poured concrete?
When somebody doesn’t want to give me a price, I’ve started asking them for an order of magnitude. Sometimes they still don’t want to say a number, but when I ask “is it 2$, 20$, 200$, 2k$, 20k$?” they will usually give me a ballpark, along with the factors that’ll make the price vary.
Sometimes you have to shame a person by insulting the number. Starting out at $2 and going up to an absurd 200k really just illustrates how wide of a range they leave open. Just give me a jumping off point. If you can’t, someone else can.
It’s a balance, they might not know exactly what the job would entail until they send someone to look, and labour could double the price if it’s something ridiculous.
However, they absolutely should be able to give a ballpark, and it drives me up the wall, especially when I’ve given enough details for them to do so.
I hate it.
If you won’t even tell me how many zeroes your service is going to cost, there is an absurdly high change you’re going to be wasting your engineer’s time doing a visit.
“How much for a 12000 BTU on the ground floor with electrical already run?”
“Well sir, we can’t give an accurate number yet, as we need to send someone out”
“Not even a ballpark?” “I’m afraid not sir”
Which led me to investigating what I could do myself…Turns out, they now make self-install units for about £600.
Or Costco sell a better brand one including fitting for £1500.
Three different HVAC companies wanted to charge me 5k plus for a second compressor to cool my second floor. I bought a $500 u-shape window unit from Amazon and have kept it perfect for 2 years now. Some of these hvac folks are on fucking drugs I swear
Unless you’re just talking about a minisplit or something $5k is remarkably cheap for a full AC install. Theres a big difference between throwing a window unit in and having an actual AC unit installed. You can’t just slap a second compressor on an existing condenser. It would need a second condenser or an upgrade and second circuit run for your existing one, plus running refrigerant pipes, likely running new wiring, ventilation, controls, refeigerant costs and system tuning. A window AC unit isn’t even in the same ballpark as far as price goes.
There is a lot of info they need that frankly you can’t trust the average client to accurately give over the phone. They need to know what your walls are made of, are they concrete, brick, wood or metal stud? Are they going to need masonry tools? What is the interior wall material; asbestos reinforced plaster is still not uncommon in older houses and if they’re working with that the the price goes up dramatically? Is there electricity run to that location already or will they need a new circuit? If there is electricity run to that location does the existing circuit have capacity to handle the load? Is there even available space to mount the new unit? Is it in a neighborhood where it will need a cage around it to deter theives? And that’s only some of the info they need.
About the only accurate price they could give you over the phone is the cost of the unit itself which you could also just find via a google search. The actual labor and other costs will vary by orders of magnitude depending on certain conditions.
The API for the PayPal checkout workflow is too complicated for us, but one of us knows how to manually type in the order details to send you an invoice.
Not unique to ADHD, perhaps, but the added step is a bigger deal to those with ADHD. Having to stop what I’m doing to make a call makes it more likely that I won’t complete my original task. I have trouble completing tasks on a daily basis so needless interruptions like this make me feel more annoyed than would probably be considered reasonable by someone without ADHD .There’s also nothing that’s terribly unique to ADHD because our symptoms are things that happen to most non-adhd people occasionally turned up in frequency and severity to a debilitating degree.
Nobody here is a doctor trying to diagnose anyone. We’re simply sharing memes that we feel are relatable, no matter if it’s relatable to normal humans or not, is a matter of exactly how much it effects your life.
For example, someone in this position with ADHD might have issues with talking on the phone because they don’t remember everything they need to ask. This gives them anxiety enough to not even call and might even hinder their mental ability to move on to another “task” because their task of calling about the desk, can’t be done.
All in all, if a behavior seen in this community effects you in a REALLY negative way, see a doctor.
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