I love competition

While Aco was en route to Tokyo for a conference, Alfie and I moved to my parents’ house until he is back next Wednesday. Coincidently, my sister also stayed over for the night and she asked me to drive her to Carrefour to buy a formula for her daughter.

The business nature of retail industry is of small margin and high volume. Due to tight competition, each retail races to increase their sales. A lot of marketing strategies have been taken, to name some: 20% discount for purchase with a certain credit card, buy-one-get-one-free, and the most frequent one: products promotion. This offers particular products at lowered price for a certain period of time -usually 2 or 3 days. The objective is to invite consumers to the store with the expectation that the customer will not go to the store just to buy the advertised product(s). Hopefully (and most of the time) they also buy other stuffs. This strategy is expected to boost their sales and of course their revenue.

If you notice, in Kompas Friday edition there are always one-full-page advertisements by either Carrefour or Hypermart or Giant - the top three hypermarkets. This week, Carrefour offered a 35,000rp discount for a tin of 900gr Pediasure (that's a milk formula for babies). Since there had been many complaints over the availability of the product, it is stated on the ad that one customer can only buy 2 tins. Since my sister wanted to stock up, she asked my other sister to come along.

So, this morning the three of us went to Carrefour quite early to anticipate the crowd and long queue at the cashier. We had this strategy that each of us had to take 2 tins and ring them at different cashier. This worked well. Around 20 minutes we each had a bag with 2 tins of Pediasure :). Mission accomplished. However, looking at the pile of Pediasure over the shelf, my sister couldn't resist the temptation to buy even more. She made a quick count: "Vanessa finished 1 tin a week. Six tins will only last for 1.5month. Let's do another round!"

So yes, we did it again. This time it took longer, but we ended up with 12 tins and saved 420,000rp. We didn't even need to buy other stuff, as Carrefour wished.

I love competition!