Apparently, as they say, “all that glitters is not gold.” Last week, I saw a television ad from Zales, the largest specialty jewelry retailer. It consisted of many pieces of attractive diamond jewelry, each described with a full price and then a markedly lower current price for Valentine’s Day. Clearly, the point of the ad was the fantastic pricing. So, I was amazed to see fine print at the bottom of the screen which said: “Original prices may not have resulted in actual sales.”

What does that mean? I think it means that the original price they quoted was a fiction–no one actually ever bought the jewelry at the higher price. They simply quoted a high number so that they current price sounded dramatically lower.

Really, duping the lovestruck seems unnecessarily cruel.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 5:59 pm and is filed under clarity, comparison shopping, disclosure, plain English, simplicity, simplification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.