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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Even without discount on the more expensive one, it can be used as a marketing trick to make you buy more expensive. For instance offer three versions of a product: $1 branded as cheap/bad, $2 branded as good, $5 branded as luxury. The last one exists mainly to anchor the value of the $2 as also cheap and to make you buy it. If one only had the choice between $1 and $2, most people would choose $1 option.

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I agree that there's been a move to split "Store Brand X" into "Store Basics X", "Store Brand X" and "Store Finest X", and that the "basic" product is often perfectly good.

However, for broader product categories, there's also a tendency for the most and least expensive products to be outliers, with the cheapest being barely enough to justify the label and the dearest being aimed at rich suckers. Hence the heuristic of getting the 2nd cheapest (especially if it's a one-off consumable, where savings won't accumulate); or, if splashing out, getting the 2nd most expensive.

In my experience this definitely applies to things like wine and chocolate, where the scale is roughly:

     |
    Q|
    u|          x
    a|             x
    l|   x  x     x                                x
    i| xx  x
    t|       
    y|     
     |x
     +----------------------------------------------
            Price

In some cases, businesses know consumers are following some heuristic like this, and counter-strategize accordingly (or so I've heard). According to this 2013 blog post[0],

> Restaurants realize that many people won’t order the least expensive wine (no one wants to look like a cheapskate!) so they often go for the second cheapest. That’s exactly why it’s often the most marked-up bottle on the list.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131210062034/http://www.urbans...

Branding and perceived high quality due to high price works ridiculously well too. My wife will always want to buy the higher price item because “it’s probably better”. I’ve looked at pricing and anchoring extensively and know better but at this point I gave up trying to convince her. Now marketers take our money and I won’t blink an eye, just cry inside.

This is what drives me to MGTOW -- Men Getting Their Own Wallet.

I know purchase manager at large companies does that quite often. Get quote from three companies. Cancel out highest and lowest bidder and confirm order to middle one.

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