I came across these signs a couple of days ago and it brought to mind one of my persistent bêtes noires: confusion pricing as a marketing tactic. Anything from presenting your lowest possible price, after quantity discount, or of the least popular option (online retailers and market traders do this all the time), or making your pricing structure so confusing that customers can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison (mobile phone companies).
I don’t recall a section in The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing that said you should aim to bamboozle and confound your customers, yet this must work simply because if it didn’t, companies wouldn’t do it.
Dealing first with bait-and-switch pricing – see the first image – with the ‘from’ in small print. There’s one colour available for 99p (yellow), everything else is £1.99. They could advertise a price of 99p to £1.99 – literally the least and most you will pay for a scarf. In fact this sign was an improvement on another store, they didn’t have the helpful information as to which colour you could have for 99p, surely leading to frustrated shoppers hunting for the promised bargain. The same store also had this large sign advertising 89 colours available inside. All the other signs mention price, the large numeral ’89′ looks at first glance like a price. When there are multiple places selling the same things along the street, the 89 might stand out, bring someone in, then an aggressive salesperson can close the pitch. I guess this isn’t really any worse than the case quoted in Reality Check of the independent hardware store owner who dealt with the opening of a massive competitor next door by changing his store sign to ‘Main Entrance’. It makes me question how this sort of approach makes the shopper feel, is ‘misled’ a good feeling to inspire?
As for confusion pricing, that practice so beloved of mobile phone companies and energy providers, I can understand that there are various nuances to the services they offer, different costs for different things to be taken into consideration, what bugs me is that they create a smorgasbord of price plans, expect the customer to choose one, and fail to tell them if they’ve chosen wrong. I would give massive props to the mobile co that simplifies their tariff offerings AND pledges to always charge you at the optimal tariff for you, not them.
Clear and fair pricing is what we should aim for confusion leads to doubt, doubt leads to fear, fear leads to anger, and we all know what happens next 
