Price Gouging Everywhere
It seems to get worse day by day. My son yesterday told me the price of a full Irish in town is now €17.50 and that doesn’t include tea or toast. Jesus how has it come to this? Well lucky for our customers we seem to have largely missed the “Price Gouging” bug.
We would never copy these supermarkets and other shops that have taken this Inflation mantra and run with it. We have all noticed that prices in most things have just shot up with no real justification in my opinion.
Prices are meant to be a function of costs + margin. Well as a business owner I can tell you some costs have risen but truthfully most of our cost hasn’t gone up by much. Staff cost has risen a bit, rent and rates are similar. Advertisement (Google) and VAT hasn’t moved. Utilities have gone up but like nearly all businesses this is a relatively small element of costs. Cost of product have moved up with some and creeped up with others but shops doubling prices are just gouging customers. Anyone, let it be businessperson, politician or media person saying any different is simply not being truthful.
I suppose the temptation for some businesses is to make hay while the sun shines and try to recover some lost COVID revenue but this will never be PlayBlue.
We are different for a few reasons, first we compete online where price is king and our competitors are all over Europe and the UK only a click away so we have to always be price and service competitive on a worldwide market and not just with a competitor down the road. Second, we believe in our fair pricing model. Our prices as always are generally based on a fair margin, nothing to do with what we “could” get. Luckily we are the biggest in the Irish market so we are able to get the sex toys we sell at the best price meaning we can sell them to you for the lowest price. If we can’t get a product and sell it for a price that makes us the cheapest we just don’t sell it.
Our morals and our best price guarantee mean we will never price gouge our customers and will always strive to give the absolute best prices we can. So why not pop into PlayBlue a Price Gouging free zone.