[ankleturtle]

> The launch is an intense marketing push with a component of artificial scarcity.

I consider artificial scarcity to be an unethical practice. It's literally lying. It uses fake timers to pressure people into buying or fake limits to suggest that they need to buy now. Does it work? Absolutely. Is it ethical? Not a chance.

[mashlol]

Do you find retail store sales to be unethical too?

[eszed]

Most of them? Yes.

The situation where "hey, we've got too much of [this] because [whatever reason], so we'll mark it down in order to sell it" is how a Free Market is 'supposed to work': prices operating as a signaling mechanism, by which everyone receives all of the (relevant) information.

Price-manipulation strategies juice sales by exploiting buyers' psychological reward mechanisms. Defenders of current practice will say it's OK because willing-buyer-willing-seller - which is certainly true - but everything about those techniques injects noise into the price-signals that make market economies efficient goods-distribution systems.

I'm kind of a free-market fundamentalist, and think any marketing beyond informational marginally contributes to market failure.

Yes, I know nearly everyone on this board makes their money downstream from manipulative marketing practices, so it's easier to close our eyes to the consequences. (I'm not playing the purity card, by the way: my company does very little marketing, but it manipulates other psychological reward systems in equally destructive-to-humanity ways.) We're all complicit in building the systems we (should) deplore.

[em-bee]

retail stores have inventory and limited space to store it. they do need to get rid of old inventory before they can store new products. because of long timespans from production to delivery, they need to anticipate demand, and sometimes they get that wrong and they don't sell their current inventory before the new stuff arrives. then they can either try to sell more through sales, or rent extra storage.