Economics: negative consumer sentiment following failure to upsell
There are several different participants in the transaction, and you may not be aware of all the issues: In some business (fast food) they are required to ask if you want to super size, they are expected to do this at every transaction, but aren't paid more if you buy more. The employee can also decide that too much pressure to up-sell may push you to purchase the item online. That will cost them a commission, the store location a sale, and maybe drive you to a different company. It is also possible they don't have the training to be able to explain the difference between the items.
"This actually works for some products, e.g. people are OK with paying a premium for ""fair trade"".  There are also ""buy one give one"" programmes where people pay an extra to feel good about their purchase. It works if you  have clear marketing." Yes it can, assuming that the margins on what you sell can actually support paying for the support staff required to do this properly.  If you already sell cheap crap, having good support is pointless.  If you're selling quality stuff that people enjoy, then hell yes you need good support. Not surprised.  This is on the back of several news stories of UK Businesses' complaints about the company. The now infamous stories of how a business was overwhelmed by customers, how the deal was poorly structured, and the most damage revelation that there is rarely an increase in business post-deal. I think that kind of separates Amazon as a product though (at least during its growth, obviously many companies are trying to compete now). Even though it's still retail, I don't need to spend time, gas, etc to go to the store, and the upsell is worth it. I think a better analogy here is Lyft vs public transit. I can take the bus, it gets me home, but $4 gets me a lyft line there and the convenience is worth the price difference. "That's a pretty good question for a six-year-old! In addition to the good answers which point out that expectations are priced in, let's deny the premises of the question: Sales do not increase the value of a company; a company could be, for example, losing money on every sale. Share prices are (at least in theory) correlated with profits.  So let's suppose that company X is unprofitable 320 days a year and is relying upon sales in late November and December to be in the black for the year. (Hence ""black Friday"".)  Carefully examine the supposition of this scenario: we have a company that is so unprofitable that it must gamble everything on successfully convincing bargain hunting consumers in a weak economy to buy stuff they don't actually need from them and not a competitor. Why would this inspire investor confidence? There are plenty of companies that fail to meet their sales targets at Christmas, for plenty of reasons." i dont think this is cynical at all, Announce you won't do aomething cheap and easy, cause 3 day outrage,  reverse course.. Customer feels like their voice will always be heard and its still cheap and easy.  Pacifism 101 Fighting scammers to the point that you drive away a significant volume of customers is cutting off your nose to spite your face.    Treating customers like they're acting in good faith and fighting scammers on the back end is the right way to do it.  Ebay and Amazon need to step up those back end efforts, though. There are a lot of outside considerations for why the grocery would be failing.  What's her location relative to housing? Big chain stores? Small business competition?  Location can make or break a brick and mortar business.  (Do you mind pming a link to the site? There could be ways of increasing online sales.) Chiming in with other answers that incriminate market segmentation attempts, I would like to offer this Seth Godin video where (among other things) he speaks about breakage, the art of making coupon redemption so difficult that most people get it wrong and do not redeem them. Oh, and when comparing/deciding which/whether to buy, I always use the up-front price. Don't want to encourage the wrong behavior. My recent Sears experience was exactly that: depressing.  I had an aging Willy Loman-esque sales clerk who begged us to give him good feedback on the survey or he'd get written up.  The desperation made me really uncomfortable. Sounds like 'up-selling'.    You can harden yourself into being a 'tough sell' but it takes time and a lot of shopping.     The quickest way to put up a defense is to never ever make a purchase over $100 without 'sleeping on it'.  Just walk away, tell them you'll think it over, and go do some more research.   Don't go back into a dealership or store that has hit you with guilt or pressure or a crazy price or whatever.   Find a no-haggle or no-frills source, or even a source to buy a used version of the item you want. No. Empirically no.  The issue at hand has little to do with market confidence. This loss of confidence is the effect of the problem. It's cause is the result of a wholly inadequate fiscal transfer mechanism that is incapable of addressing demand shocks. While there are relevant political and ideological parameters worthy of analysis, they render themselves moot because of the structural constraints of monetary union.  My two cents. No. Supply takes 5yrs to come on line from planting to harvesting. The issue on the supply side has been twofold: 1) vanilla bean prices have been falling for some time so many farmers switched to other crops, 2) 50%+ of all vanilla bean is grown in Madasgar, which experienced a typhoon, which damaged a bunch of the existing crop. On the demand side, people are switching from artificial flavoring to more natural ingredients, which actually taste much better too.    So, there's a significant demand/supply imbalance which will utilitmately correct but it could take a long time to do so.   My problem is figuring out a viable shorting mechanism as the commodity is not publicly traded and the timeframe is long The satisfaction from gains packs less of an emotional impact than the fear of loss. It's very difficult for many people to overcome this fear, so when prices begin to fall, many investors sell to minimize their potential loss. This causes a further drop, which can lead to more selling as other investors reach their emotional threshold for loss. This emotion-based selling keeps the market inefficient in the short term. If there aren't enough value investors waiting to scoop up the stock at the new discount, it can stay undervalued for a long time. In and of itself it wasn't. But could the ill will it left with the general investing public make people more wary of future IPOs and thus, lower their potential starting points?  Thereby leading to a drought of IPOs as companies don't see themselves getting as much.