The Good Guys has agreed to a $13.5 million fine, plus customer remediation, after the consumer watchdog found the retailer’s ‘Storecash’ promotion misled customers over a four-year period.
The whole thing was smokes and mirrors imo.
What are your thoughts? What remediation would we see from TGG?
Wait how is it a fine on consumers ? Won't JB pay ?
And just where do you think JB gets its money from? Thin air? You think shareholders are going to chip in? The buck stops with the last link in the chain, end users and consumers.
At the end of the day, the consumers are ultimately going to be the ones footing the bill for any "fines". Ok, sure, JB may have other streams of revenue (investments and whatnot) but realistically, a majority of their profits comes from trading goods for money.
A "fine" is just going to be added as "operating costs" and spread out over the goods and services they sell to cover that "unexpected operating cost". It will just be absorbed by the consumers. While it may only be a few dollars here and there or a few less "sales" a year, ultimately, this is just a fine on consumers.
What these corporate fines need to be is a personal fine on the CEO's. Somewhere they cant just dump it back onto consumers. I bet the CE* class of execs would take a much keener interesting in not letting this shit happen if they know that this $13 million was coming out of their own pockets and couldn't just be transferred back to consumers.
Damn is this what they call circular economy
Consumers will just go to across the street to a competitor that hasn't been fined and isn't raising prices to recoup the money. This will just come off their profit. By being dodgy they've likely made more money than the fine anyway and just see it as a cost of doing business.
@JIMB0: Yep, they'll walk across the road to JB Hi Fi thinking they've boycotted the company. I didn't even know The Good Guys was owned by JB Hi Fi.
Yes, one was consumers will pay for it is that they will have less sales or items on sale. Its all funny money.
nice explanation, but have you heard a thing called free market?
This isnt a fine on the business, it's a fine on consumers. We pay this fine at the end of the day. They just add it to the operating costs and just pump up prices to cover this loss.
I'm not sure how they'll pass this on. A well run business should already be charging as much as the consumer will pay to maximise profits. It's not like they have a monopoly position where consumers have no where else to go.
As JIMB0 has already said above, the way capitalism works is that a business gouges the hell out of prices until just before the point that consumers cry so hard that they stop shopping there entirely and go someplace else.
At an absolute minimum, The Good Guys now has $13.5M less capital to play with, a cost that their competitors do not need to factor into their own prices.
It is also true that these kinds of numbers can end up being treated as marketing expenses, but marketing expenses are already built into a business' budget, they can't just keep raising marketing costs to infinity.
Slap on the butt
What would be an appropriate fine. 13 million is not less though
Was that consensual?
Harvey Norman regularly runs identical promotions, I wonder if they are already being investigated.
Most probably . ACCC is awake now
The way Harvey Norman gets away with it is they threaten media outlets of pulling advertising if they ran a negative story about them. Ever notice the full page spreads in the papers and magazines? Or all the commercials they run on free to air tv? Those adds aren't cheap, its a lot of money to the media outlets. The media outlets bend over backwards to not loose that revenue so they axe any negative publicity.
you mean the 10% of purchase price back as a gift card promotions? the ones were there is no requirement to opt into marketing materials, and all over the advertising materials is the validity period of the gift card?
"fine" Money for the pockets.
Deep
Their name is misleading now. They should be forced to change it.
has a nice ring to it.
Their slogan could be “We’re not great. Just better than Harvey.”
Lol
Fine Guys
I wouldnt even call them the "slightly better guys". Their customer service has gone down the drain and they keep chopping and changing their own terms.
There was a time when TGG was amazing and will price match any online advertised price.. then they added condition to limit who they match the prices to.. and now they have stopped matching Costco's price as apparently it is a wholesales..
To be fair Costco does say Costco Wholesale in the title. It is also a members club where fees are paid that could offset the prices of goods.
The problem is they keep chopping and changing, and every store gives you a different version.. they still match Amazon prices which is also membership based and purely an online retailer.. so why stop matching Costco price only.. this wasnt a problem 2 years ago.
@Megatron: I do agree that the site is very cagey about who they price match. They do point people to ring the phone number to find out about price matching. I would that before going to a store.
The Amazon comparison with Costco would only be if they matched the Amazon prime included delivery fee. That is where a fee is involved for the membership.
Maybe they have 2 years worth of data that says it is just too expensive to match Costco prices.
Ultimately it is their store and their choice, as long as they are transparent about how it applies. They probably consider the phone number information would be the definitive answer.
Priced in
So where does the $13m go? Lining the pockets of the wrong people. How should consumers be compensated?
It goes into general revenue. It contributes to government services that benefit everyone such as prisons, road maintenance and schools.
I notice they now call it 90 Day Store Cash and the T&Cs are plastered with it only being available for 90 days.
Had that happen with the Concierge Gold thing. Worst part was that despite them saying i wasnt opted in, i WAS getting marketing emails. They ended up crediting me anyway.
On another note, i got an email from TGG for a $20 no min spend after entering a fb competition. Set a calendar reminder and now, poof its disappeared. Not sure how they revoked that.
They dont care. This would have been considered "marketing losses" for that promotion. Their advertising budget for that whole episode would have been more than the fine…
And why would they care… This isnt a fine on the business, it's a fine on consumers. We pay this fine at the end of the day. They just add it to the operating costs and just pump up prices to cover this loss.