In the United Kingdom discounting, which
is the practice of selling goods at less than the price recommended by the
manufacturers, has had a chequered past. Up until the 1970s most manufacturers
believed that it was in their own best interests to enforce rigid retail price
maintenance so that all shops sold their products at exactly the same price.
Discount stores were set up however and these proved very popular with the
population in general but retailers began to complain that their sales and
profit margins were being eroded by these newcomers and it became very common
for manufacturers to refuse to deliver goods to them, and when the discount
store owners got hold of products by a circuitious method a lawsuit was a
common result! This was cutting down on competition however and the simple
fact was that more and more retailers were following a policy of low profit
but high sales volume, particularly on more expensive products such as
television sets, refrigerators, cookers etc on which there were traditionally
high profit margins but this eventually filtered down to even the lowest
priced consumer goods. Retail price maintenance was eventually abandoned and
its legal protection stripped away so now any retailer is free to sell a
product at whatever price he or she wishes to sell it at, although there are
still some designer label manufacturers who are fighting a rearguard action.
Try here for discount
cooker hoods
commercial motor insurance
taxi insurance
Now that the Internet has come of age
discounting is absolutely rife because it is now possible to display and sell
a whole multitude of products without the necessity of expensive shop
frontages and without needing to have highly paid sales staff. This has led to
a common practice among many consumers of going into, say, electrical stores,
selecting the most suitable brand and model of whatever they wish to purchase,
and then going home to sit on the Internet and find the cheapest possible
price. Hardly surprisingly this has hit retailers extremely hard particularly
those selling the larger consumer items which require plenty of display space.
Even before the current financial crisis retailers were starting to go to the
wall in large numbers.
Is this the end of the high street as we
know it? Quite possibly. Corner shops were put out of business by discount
stores; it looks increasingly likely that discount stores are now being put
out of business by online businesses.