Product Sabotage

Why would a company deliberately hide its best product?

Take the secret cappuccino, which you can buy in two of the leading coffee 
chains, Starbucks and Coffee Republic. 
The sales assistants know what the drink is and they have a little button on 
their cash tills to ring it up. It's cheaper than the other drinks on offer, 
but it doesn't appear on the menu. Starbucks claims that's because they don't 
have room on the menu board. Coffee Republic doesn't even have that excuse: 
there's a blank space with no price where this drink should be listed. 

It's called the "short cappuccino", and it's smaller, cheaper and better than 
the smallest size on the menu, the "tall". Coffee companies hide or downplay 
the cheaper drinks in the hope that customers will buy something pricier...

... Supermarkets package their cheapest products to look more like famine 
relief than something you'd want to pay for. It's not because they can't afford 
sexy packaging even for their cheapest foods - it's because they want to 
persuade richer customers to buy something more expensive instead. 

Economists call this "product sabotage" 

 In the hi-tech world it is common to produce a high-specification product, 
sold at a premium price, and then sell the same product more cheaply with some 
of the functions disabled. Intel did this with its 486 computer chip in the 
early 1990s, and IBM did it with a printer: the economy version for home users 
was simply the top-of-the-range model with a chip in it to slow it down....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5274352.stm

Indeed , the Chaos of Capitalism .

alan johnstone , edinburgh br 






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