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An Example: HDD Price Development Before Black Friday (Single Sample/ Product Only)
(external.binaryriot.org)
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I highly recommend the Keepa extension on chrome or the like (camel camel camel, etc.)
Here is their chart for the last year (US pricing) - https://i.imgur.com/pKoSanC.png
Wonder what caused the spike in March.
Someone said "oh crap my HDD crashed I got purchase a new drive yesterday" and paid whatever they were charged and just accepted it.
That's the "actual price". It's been on "sale" for 95% of the time. I wouldn't be surprised if they legally have to sell it at it's actual price at least some of the time.
Wouldn't they lose money by always having it include a discount?
No, the scare quotes are there for a reason. They've determined that the most profitable price point is at $300, but they want to advertise "50% off!" without actually lowering the price, so they raise the price to some ridiculous number for as short as legally possible, then claim that it's the "real" price and say that $300 is discounted.
It's just lying, and it's illegal in many jurisdictions. For example, Dell recently got fined $10,000,000 in Australia for advertising "was $x, now $y" discounts when $x was not the price for the majority of the product's recent availability.