Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotesA discount can be a confession.
The theatre thinks it has reduced the financial risk. The buyer wonders why nobody else wants the seats. And because the ticket is only one part of a night involving food, travel, childcare and several irreplaceable hours, saving £20 matters less than avoiding three hours of aggressively mediocre singing.
Empty restaurants suffer the same arithmetic. So do training courses suddenly reduced by 70%, and software vendors offering an enormous discount before the buyer has objected to price. Cheapness can suggest efficiency. It can also suggest weak demand, poor confidence or a target being chased down a corridor.
Economics gets silly when it pretends price communicates only sacrifice. Price is gossip. It tells buyers what the seller may believe, what other buyers may have done and how embarrassing a bad choice might become. Full price can lower perceived risk when quality is uncertain.
Discounts still work when their story makes sense: off-peak capacity, an annual commitment, a trial, a damaged box. Explain the reason or customers will invent one, usually crueller than yours. “We charge less” is not a complete proposition. Less than what, and why?
Sometimes cheaper reduces the cost of being wrong. Sometimes it increases the suspicion that you are.