Toys ‘R Us is out of business.
It was fun while it lasted. Did you go to the liquidation sales they held?
Everything 50% off. Then next week, everything 60% off. Then 70% off.
Like standard practice in these retail liquidation events, they kept having bigger and bigger discounts until everything was gone. Everything has a price that people are willing to pay for it. That’s capitalism. It’s actually a lot like an auction.
I went to one of the sales. Everything was 60% off. But the weird thing is, I couldn’t find any deals that were appealing to me. I think it was because the sales happened so gradually. It’s like strip mining, where one layer is removed at a time. I suspect that I might have found some deals if I went precisely when they upped the sale to the next level of discounts.
But will such a model work for a store that’s not going out of business? What if you fully stocked a store and started selling everything full price, then gradually gave larger and larger discounts? What if each week, you upped the discount by 5% or 10% until in the end, everything that was left was free? Everything has a price that people are willing to pay. After the store is emptied, you could restock and start over. Would that be a profitable business model?
Maybe, maybe not. I suppose you could test the idea on a small scale on eBay or some other online marketplace. It might actually work best on an auction site like eBay, because if you started selling something for 90% off, but someone was willing to pay the 40% off price, you would make the extra profit.
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