Last weekend, Fred was scanning the car ads in the newspaper and saw an ad for a beautiful used luxury car for what seemed like an incredible price. The ad showed the car for sale at $34,900. The lowest price Fred had seen previously was $83,000. Fred thought he’d hit the jackpot and rushed down to buy the car. Can you guess what happened? When Fred talked to the salesperson he was told that the correct price was $84,900 and the newspaper had made an error. So did Fred save $50,000 because of the typo? Unfortunately for Fred, no.
There appears to be a fairly widespread belief that consumers are entitled to buy an item for whatever price appears in the paper. However, this isn’t the case. Mistakes happen and I believe that if more people understood the process of advertising they would understand why errors can occur. We run a used car ad almost everyday and everyday the process goes as follows:
- The newspaper usually phones us to ask if we have any changes for our ad.
- To make our changes we dictate the ad copy while the person on the other end of the conversation takes notes.
- The newspaper person that takes the information then sends it on its journey through the newspaper’s process until it gets printed.
In Fred’s example above, someone along the chain read the “8″ as a “3″ and the rest is history.
Now most dealerships will want a mistake like that changed as soon as possible. Believe me, salespeople get pretty cranky when they are taking call after call about a pricing misprint. Generally, these types of mistakes can be corrected for the following day. Advertising deadlines for the next day’s ads are generally in the early afternoon. So if the error isn’t detected until late in the day, then the incorrect price might run one more day until it is fixed.
So next time you see an ad price that looks way too good to be true, take a second and consider whether you are looking at a typo. Perhaps someone thought that the “7″ was a “1″ or the “4″ was supposed to be a “9″
