Australia has good consumer-protection laws for advertising. In theory. In practice, smaller players ignore these with impunity, and even larger players can casually play around the edges of legality and strategically ignore them completely from time to time, managing it so that in the unlikely event of them actually getting fined they probably still come out ahead.
I know of one Clevo laptop manufacturer (frankly that’s enough to find them, but I’m not mentioning their name) that has perpetual discounts, never less than 20% off, mostly 30–40% off, half of the time in extensions of the offer. They do shuffle around which particular components have a discount at the current time, which I presume is a sneaky way of trying to satisfy the two-price advertising laws, but in years of monitoring them I have never seen them advertise any units at the nominal full price. What they’re doing is clearly against the spirit of the law, though that component pricing rotation might satisfy the letter of the law, though I doubt it. I complained to them once and was brushed off.
I know of an outdoors solar/battery/&c. manufacturer that has been advertising their own line of 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ at $489–469 every time I’ve looked since last July (eleven occasions), on an alleged RRP of $1,299, more recently $899. Such a permanent “markdown” is categorically illegal. But I don’t even feel it worth complaining to them or ACCC because I know nothing will come of it.
And probably the biggest name in that style of solar/battery stuff has through almost all that time maintained a struck-out price for their 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ battery of $900, but I’ve seen them selling it at a wide variety of prices in the range $630–830, and only once at $900, perhaps to maintain the validity of the magnitude of the “discount”.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and lies are even more sustainable than that. No end of terrible products have remained on the market for a long, long time because they can keep getting new customers that don’t yet know that they’re lying. And if people catch on, just rebrand. Building on lies you won’t be the much-beloved-but-potentially-niche brand, but you’ll make plenty of money so long as you’re actually good at lying.
Your position that lies are unsustainable is, in the business world at large, naive and quite wrong. Only in very small markets do lies become unsustainable.
I know of one Clevo laptop manufacturer (frankly that’s enough to find them, but I’m not mentioning their name) that has perpetual discounts, never less than 20% off, mostly 30–40% off, half of the time in extensions of the offer. They do shuffle around which particular components have a discount at the current time, which I presume is a sneaky way of trying to satisfy the two-price advertising laws, but in years of monitoring them I have never seen them advertise any units at the nominal full price. What they’re doing is clearly against the spirit of the law, though that component pricing rotation might satisfy the letter of the law, though I doubt it. I complained to them once and was brushed off.
I know of an outdoors solar/battery/&c. manufacturer that has been advertising their own line of 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ at $489–469 every time I’ve looked since last July (eleven occasions), on an alleged RRP of $1,299, more recently $899. Such a permanent “markdown” is categorically illegal. But I don’t even feel it worth complaining to them or ACCC because I know nothing will come of it.
And probably the biggest name in that style of solar/battery stuff has through almost all that time maintained a struck-out price for their 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ battery of $900, but I’ve seen them selling it at a wide variety of prices in the range $630–830, and only once at $900, perhaps to maintain the validity of the magnitude of the “discount”.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and lies are even more sustainable than that. No end of terrible products have remained on the market for a long, long time because they can keep getting new customers that don’t yet know that they’re lying. And if people catch on, just rebrand. Building on lies you won’t be the much-beloved-but-potentially-niche brand, but you’ll make plenty of money so long as you’re actually good at lying.
Your position that lies are unsustainable is, in the business world at large, naive and quite wrong. Only in very small markets do lies become unsustainable.