Comment by c22
2 days ago
A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
awesome insight. i've heard this referred to as the "site merchandising" problem. There are some products that are there to attract people / give them a choice, but they don't sell themselves.
Reminiscent of halo cars in the automotive industry. Fancy flagship vehicles produced to show off the brand and bring attention (to their other vehicles), but not necessarily to become profit makers themselves.
Yeah, my theory was that the yellow ones caught people's eye since it stood out from the visual clutter, but yellow isn't anyone's favorite color, so you end up buying blue or red...
3 replies →
Or the Mac Pro.
Cafes use it too. E.g. a corner coffee shop may stock pastries that nobody buys. When people walk in "wow look at all their pastries!" And they feel good and become regulars.
I heard plasma tvs did exactly that for beard trimmers or whatever.