Words: Ian Palmer

Did you know there’s a sale on? Kitchens are half-price. The offer ends on Wednesday; from Thursday they’ll be half-price.

Hurry up and buy, before the price stays the same.

It’s been this way, in the mass market, for a long time. Very early in its history, Wren was EDLP – Every Day Low Price – and critical of other retailers’ yo-yo pricing; some of their early press can still be found online. That didn’t last long, and Wren now borrows from the trade outlets a model – high list price, dramatic discounts on a whole kitchen – which means top prices don’t even need to be established: the yo-yo never needs to go back up.

Some others stick to the traditional model, full price for a month (usually when the designers go on holiday), then back to half-price. I suspect that under either model, nobody’s sold a kitchen at “full price” for a very long time, if ever.

I was at B&Q more than a decade ago when they switched to EDLP on kitchens at the last minute before a Winter Sale. Designers were given no notice (we were wondering why we’d had no details on the coming offer) and most were wrong-footed; I was unaffected, because I wasn’t selling discounts in the first place.

Sales plummeted, and quite soon afterwards, the company intentionally scaled back its interest in kitchens, laying off designers and closing its installation service. I’ve always believed that was the plan all along.

Thus, nobody in recent years has demonstrated that open pricing can work in the mass market. But nobody has needed to. Until the pandemic, everyone was getting by.

That’s no longer the case. Optimism is de rigueur, but kitchen sales volume declines year on year, and authoritative voices like the CEO of Howdens tell us that’s going to continue. Reasons may be external, but the old ways aren’t getting results.

I’ve met the occasional innocent who still believes that Sale pricing is to clear seasonal overstocks (all those Winter kitchens out the back), and of course there are those who are persuaded that prices will triple after Wednesday (or if not, then the Wednesday after that). But there are smarter consumers too, who notice that kitchens are never full price, and the trick doesn’t work on them.

Sooner or later, they might become the majority, and by then we’ll have taught them to see us as they see double-glazing sales people: as retailers who don’t tell the truth. Meanwhile, many of the independents have a weapon against the sheds ready-made: “We don’t do smoke and mirrors”, they can say, “We’ll respect your intelligence”.

It takes some courage to experiment when times are hard, and kitchen times now are about as hard as they’ve ever been. But perhaps this is when change is needed. If you can’t sell kitchens anyway, what’s to lose?

Now might be the time for somebody to stand out by dispelling the smoke and breaking the mirrors, and just coming clean about the price. The straplines write themselves: No More Tricks. No Flim-Flam. Ask Us The Price, We’ll Tell You.

It’s harder to sell the product than it is to sell the discount. It takes more professionalism, more knowledge, more skill, and more time. But like the poster says, you can’t do the same today as you did yesterday and expect a different result – and yesterday’s results are not what they used to be.

Is It time to drop the yo-yo?