SO, on the way home from Estate sailing I stopped at Target looking for closeouts, none. I noticed the Bob Marley Exodus exclusive (includes a Tee Shirt) on the shelf, underneath it, the price marker said $11.99 (list is $39.99, new at Discogs $24.99 shippped). Brought it over to the electronics kiosk, they scanned it, came up $39.99. Drug the poor clerk over to records, pointed out the $11.99 price and he said OK, I'll sell you 1 (not all 3 that I wanted) at $11.99. Cool beans. Then stopped by another Target, mismarked at $11.99 there as well. Same drill but the clerk puled the erroneous price sticker off the shelf. So I scored one for my own self and one for daughter's bf who's a big Marley fan. You Marley fans may want to jump on this. These stores were in Allen, Tx., a 'burb of Dallas but, this seems to be systemic. No other deals of note found.
Yeah Target is so weird. They will clearance out things like the Exodus set, and The Wall, then a month later they will go restock them at every store for full price. I'm not sure if they understand what the clearance tool means
I'm sort of surprised that Target hasn't followed Best Buy's lead and simply eliminated music from their stores. Well, maybe they are going to do that in the future since it has already happened in my local stores. I never saw much stocked in the small "City Target" stores to begin with and now there's nothing. I went to the largest Target in San Francisco on Monday and it looks like they completely eliminated both music and movies from that store as well. They still had some books and video games in the area, but not a lot of those either.
I went to 2 Targets, a "superstore" with maybe 20 or so titles stocked. The smaller, much older, one, with no grocery section, had 40-ish stocked. Of course both had only the biggest current and classic rock artists. I was looking for "Nevermind". No joy/
Target B2G1 sale is back starting Sunday, but it doesn't include music this go-around. Movies, games and books.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cut out music on these future B2G1 sales for good. I know that when they came up, I would buy expensive box sets and save hundreds of dollars. In fact, I wouldn't have gotten my Pink Floyd Later Years box but for the Target sale. Some exec must have looked at all us music collectors flocking to Target during these sales and loading up and figured it wasn't good for them financially. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't see them getting the same reaction on books. movies and board games.
I think there are a lot of factors involved, and people figuring out that you really didn't have to buy 3 to take advantage of the sale (i.e., buy three of the same item and then cancel two, resulting in getting one item at a 33% discount) surely didn't help Target's profitability when running these sales. That doesn't even address inventory issues -- it seems like a lot of specialty music releases are unavailable as soon as they are released.
Oh, I don't know if anybody at Target has noticed any of these things or cared about them, if they did.
Not anyone you or I could speak with, but if they don't have anyone paying attention to profit margins in different categories I doubt they would be as successful as they are.
A loss leader is something to get people into a store with the hope that they buy other products with a better profit margin while they are there. I don't think this translates to online shopping since you can easily just go to the site, find the deal, put it in your cart, and check out. It isn't like you have to wander by other products on your way to the cash register when you shop online.
fair point. i would argue that modern ecommerce platforms regularly accomplish something akin to what you mentioned in your last statement, but target's entire site is quite bad considering how large a company they are.
We're in a bubble. I doubt that the Target sales margins or website sales as a whole are affected by people doing the cancel gimmick. Even if they did notice, somebody could do some code and not allow the cancel trick to work.
Heads up, Audiophiles! Target is running a $5 off vinyl sale with the purchase of a Crosley turntable.