Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Bizarre Retail Practices

I was looking for Christmas cards for family in a well-known high street shop the other day. They had some really beautiful cards. But all the best cards were in boxes of 10 identical cards for £4.99 or £6.99, which just seems totally bizarre to me.

People buy the nicest Christmas cards for the people they are closest to. And the people they are closest to often know the other people they are closest to and spend time in their houses. So I don't want the same design of Christmas card for my parents (for example) as for my sisters. I want to show that individual thought has gone into it.

Had these cards been selling at £1.50 each, I'd probably have bought quite a few. If they'd been in boxes of 10 mixed cards, I'd have been delighted. But when the smallest quantity buyable was a box of 10, and they were all identical, I'm not going to do it, and it wasn't surprising that there were so many of these boxes of nice Christmas cards still on the shelves a few days before Christmas.

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