Opinion

Is it promotion or fraud?

December 11, 2018
Is it promotion or fraud?

Rasheed Al-Bidani

Okaz

We are faced with a calculated campaign of fraud that victimized the poor consumer. This is a clear theft of consumer›s money and the traders are generating huge profits in an illegitimate way.

THERE is a widespread phenomenon and we all know it very well. I mean the phenomenon of retailers offering huge discounts on their goods and products on special occasions.

In the West, people celebrate the end-of-the-year promotions with huge discount sales. Now businessmen in many Arab countries are copying this same phenomenon.

A person visiting any country in the East or West will notice through their satellite channels and in their newspapers how widespread this «discount sales» phenomenon is.

People rush to buy these goods and sometimes they buy things that they do not need. They buy them just because there is a discount offered and they often do it without verifying whether this discount offer is real or fraudulent.

I was surprised when I recently saw an advertisement claiming to offer an 80 percent discount on certain goods for an occasion called Black Friday in the West. Many businessmen in our Arab countries changed this Black Friday into «White Friday», so that they will not look disrespecting the Muslim holy day of the week.

This made me ask some legitimate questions myself. How is it possible to offer such high percentages of discounts from the profits generated from the sales or is the discount on the actual cost of making these products?

If the discount was on the cost of a product, then the manufacturer will soon declare bankruptcy as he is going to incur great losses. On the other hand, if the discount offered was from the profits earned by the businessmen, then how much is the rate of profits? Or are these high amounts of discounts real?

In the current business environment, it is impossible to offer such huge discounts unless the product is faked.

We are facing two possibilities here: The actual price of the product before the promotion campaign could have been way different from the price during the campaign. That is, if the actual price of a product was SR50 or SR60, during the promotion campaign it was raised to SR100 and then the product is sold at a discounted price of SR50. If that is the case, it is blatant fraud.

The second possibility is that the quality of the goods offered is less compared to the products offered for sale before the promotion. This is what I heard from the Western media, which claimed that production lines in their factories were manufacturing products with less quality for the Black Friday special discounts season.

Both possibilities take us to one clear conclusion. We are faced with a calculated campaign of fraud that victimized the poor consumer. This is a clear theft of consumer›s money and the traders are generating huge profits in an illegitimate way.

This culture of cheating is not limited to our society as many people might think. This is a human instinct that exists everywhere as long as there are people. Lastly, does the honest businessman really exist in our times?


December 11, 2018
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