Are Price Promises actually worth anything?

Written by Alistair

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Welcome back, i've missed you did you know that you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This can be a difficult question, lots of companies offer a price promise – find it cheaper and we’ll refund double the difference or an extra 10%, but do they actually mean anything?

So how do they work in action, take for example the weekend just gone, I went to Sainsbury to buy a new TV a Samsung 32” in fact. Unfortunately Sainsbury had sold out BUT would have a new delivery on Thursday, impatient for a TV I then went to Currys in Exeter to find exactly the same TV but £50 more expensive, never mind I thought they have a price promise, which not only offers to match but also give you 10% of the difference.

Currys Price Promise
The all encompassing price promise isn’t as it seems, it doesn’t work if the item is out of stock, the fact Sainsbury sold the TV and were getting them back in on Thursday (4 days time) carried no sway. You would have to pay £50 more for the same thing, so basically Currys let the sale walk out the door for £50 that they would have given anyway, seems bizarre to me!

And yes before you ask I waited the 4 days…..

So the upshot if you are going to offer a price promise then do it, not yes we can do it BUT ‘xyz’, we live in a competitive world where people will shop around. It was Peter Drucker who said

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”