We’ve been driveway boondocking at our Cottage in RI for since early October … visiting with friends, doing some maintenance, making some updates and as (un)luck may have it, replacing some major components in the house. But, that is a post for another time.
Amana Range on TheHomeDepot.com - This is a scan of the page I printed when I made the purchase. Note the price of the range is $449.00
What we have been planning to replace for some time is the current stove and oven combo. The kitchen in this house is a small room and has a small 20″ electric range/oven. It’s worked out just fine for the last 20 years, but the stove had seen its better years and it was time to replace it. We’ve been looking around for a new one checking all the big box stores, and decided on a 20″ Amana Freestanding Electric Range from The Home Depot.
This is the bookmark that was set in my browser. I checked this link every few days
We had to make some other updates, and repairs to the house before we were ready to buy the new stove, so I added it as a bookmark in my browser. Not just a typical, bookmark the page and it ends up in the list with every other bookmark that you hardly, if ever, go back to – but rather, this was an “in my face”, every time I open my browser bookmark .. and for me, that’s a lot of every day.
As we knew this was the stove we were going to buy, I clicked over to the page every few days to see if it the price went down or if it was on sale. Sure enough as the holidays came around The Home Depot added a new sale: 10% off appliances $297 and up. This was great! We were far enough into finished projects to order the new stove and now it was 10% off, a savings of $44.90, had free delivery and free old appliance take away. On December 13, 2011 I placed an order for the new stove. We paid $449.00 for the stove, $28.29 in sales tax, then received a $44.90 discount/coupon, for an end price of $432.39. This was right within budget for a new stove for this kitchen, it would fit perfectly and was a clean match for the fridge and cabinet colors.
This is our order receipt for the purchase of the Amana Range on 12/13/2011. Note the unit price of $449.00, from which we received a discount of $44.90 during the sale period of 12/1/2011 - 12/21/2011
On December 15th, 2011 we received delivery of the new stove from The Home Depot. The delivery was great, the 2 man crew very pleasant and professional and we were 100% satisfied with our purchase.
Two days after delivery, on Saturday December 17th, I decided to delete the bookmark from my browser bar. I had no use for it anymore and it’s a bookmark with a long description, taking up a lot of browser “real estate”. For whatever reason, I decided to click on the link before deleting it and saw that The Home Depot RAISED the regular price of the 20″ Amana Freestanding Electric Range that we just had delivered two days earlier. It’s the same range, the same part number, the same bookmark link – but it was now listed at a regular price of $269.00, instead of the $249.00 I purchased it at four days earlier AND the date of the sale is still the same. When we purchased the stove the sale dates were 12/01/2011 – 12/21/2011 … and the sale dates on my bookmarked page were still the same.
Everything about the bookmarked page was the same, including the “Shoppers who viewed this item purchased” box on the right hand side of the page. The same freestanding ranges were shown and just like the Amana we purchased, the pricing on the “Shoppers who viewed this item purchased” ranges had increased as well.
This is a screen capture of the item bookmarked at TheHomeDepot.com. The regular price for the all the ranges on the page INCREASED while the items are on sale
I don’t usually get up on my soapbox very often, but this all feels very unethical to me. Sure if I bought the stove this weekend, I still would have paid less than the regular price that I had originally seen it advertised at, but is it really right, ethical, or legal to raise the regular selling price of an item in the middle of an advertised sale period? And from what I can see, the price on at least 4 items that I have previously viewed.
Shame on you The Home Depot!
