[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.