Two for the price of one

The consumer society here has been honed to an alarming degree and nowhere is this more apparent than the supermarkets.

Virtually every product on the shelves has some sort of offer, the most common being "buy two, get one free"

It works on human greed at its most base level and really only serves to both entice people to buy more than they really need and also to fool people that they are getting a bargain.
You have to ask yourself why they don't just reduce the price of a single article instead of offering you a free one if you buy two ?

Cans of drink have had "33% extra" pasted on their rims for as long as I can remember, so why do it ?
If it were a short term tactic of selling a product at the same price as one without that extra 33%, I'd understand.

The persistance of .99 remains embedded in the psyche of marketing hype, so I figure we must all be subliminally fooled by it. £9.99 is 1p short of £10. A single penny.
Somehow, our minds seem, against our best wishes, to get lured toward £9. It works, despite the fact that we all know it shouldn't.

Therefore all these other enfuriating tactics also work.

Another aspect of shopping here that I haven't been lured into (not yet anyway), are saver cards, where if you buy a certain amount, you get discounts. Again, this is an attempt to make us buy more than we need. The mouth of the consumer constantly being force fed with enticements.
At every checkout till, the words "Have you got a Nectar card" or some such malarky.
I don't even know what one is, or where to get one and I haven't bothered to find out yet.

Is all this really different from markets of old ?

Did people a 100 years ago get a free sack of spuds with every piglet they purchased ?
Buy two kegs of ale, get a free cabbage ?

Perhaps they did, in fact, I'm certain that these same tactics have been with us for as long as we've bartered and traded for goods.

I'm not so certain that a piglet would have a branding of "33% extra" on it's hind quarters, although it's an interesting visual.

I recently wanted to buy a CD marking pen and for the life of me, I could only find them in packs of two. I asked the shop attendent if I couldn't just buy one, which confused the poor lout no end. He was about to consult his manager. Turns out, when I got home, one of them didn't work anyway, so I ended up with one for the price of two.

Works both ways I guess.