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The blame for such tricky practices does not all lie on retailers. Everybody is a little at fault. Says Chicago B.B.B. Vice President Aubra Johnston: "The customer wants to think he drove a hard bargain. The retailer helps him kid himself. And the retailer and the manufacturer get together to back up their inflated price." Many a merchant blames his competitors, says he would like to stop, "but I have to do it to stay in business." In rare instances, store executives are hoodwinked by their own buyers. One San Francisco department store found its buyer offering ladies' wool coats at "$14.99, formerly $19.95 to $25.95." It turned out that every other store regularly sold them at $14.99. The buyer's excuse: he wanted to make his department look good.
More and more customers are becoming suspicious of price cuts. A study by Pittsburgh's Duquesne University shows that buyers strongly suspect claims of price cuts above 27.5%. Polks, a large Chicago discount house, recently got a shipment of $49.95 record players that really had listed for that. But when it put them on sale at $18, it made no mention of the old price because: "the comparison would not have been believed." As a result, many stores are changing sales tactics. The J. L. Hudson Co., Detroit's top department store, no longer allows "was-is" advertising in its newspaper or house displays; instead, it insists on such low-key language as "on sale" or "specially priced." Downtown stores in Chicago, Milwaukee and Indianapolis have agreed to stop advertising comparative prices on mattresses.
In all this, nobody is aiming at the real bargain, such as the genuine month-end clearance, the special purchase, distress merchandise, the end-of-the-season markdown of broken lots. But what the FTC, the Better Business Bureaus and merchandising groups (such as the National Retail Merchants Association) want to end are the phony price-cuts. The merchants, many of whom have prodded the FTC to get tougher, feel that if they do not voluntarily police their industry, Congress will step in and do it for them—just as the Monroney law outlawed phony price-packing by auto dealers.