Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

It’s Time To Get Straight To The Point

Last week I made a trip down to Queensway Shopping Centre here in Singapore to replenish my supply of contact lenses. Just to put things in perspective for people not in Singapore, a third of the shops on the first floor are optical shops, a third are for shoes, and the last third are clothes stores. So it’s the perfect place to go for any of these three categories of consumer items.

To cut a long story short, I walked one round around the first floor and walked into almost every optical shop , and was quoted anywhere from $41 to $48 for a box of contact lenses, depending on the quantity of boxes I intended to buy. Eventually I reached a shop that offered me $42 for 4 boxes, told her I’d buy 8 boxes if she brought the price down, and got them for $40 a box. Pretty ok deal.

Here’s the thing, I don’t understand why different shops would bother setting such different prices, when all the consumer has to do is spend half an hour walking around to get price comparisons. It’s literally “perfect information” to borrow an economics term, at least within the building.

Wouldn’t it be better to just throw out the bullshit, get straight to the point and give a good offer from the get go? Why play hard to get? Why not start out with a good price and get $320 of sales, instead of risking the consumer walking to the next store three shops away, and letting them get that $320 in revenue? Is it worth that extra profit margin ($41 vs $42?)

I mean the contact lenses are exactly the same from shop to shop, the only differentiator being price.

Maybe when times were good, people would rather go to the first shop and just pay the money and go. Now I think consumers are even more concerned about getting a better “deal”, and it would be better if small businesses like these, start realising that.

Just for reference, this is the shop that gives you good deals for contact lenses:
No.1 Queensway
#01-50
Singapore 149053
Tel:6474 7717

Tags: buy contact lenses, perfect information, queensway shopping centre, Singapore