They have been doing this ever since I can remember. I recall that they allegedly tried to convince the shopper that it is ‘50%’ or ‘80%’ off. A few times I think it was ‘90% off’. Kudos to Quebec for having the courage to investigate and prosecute. I don’t think it will change much, however. Once, I had a clerk tell me ‘Don’t buy it now, tomorrow it will be 50% off’. He showed me the schedule of ‘price reductions’ for it for the next 12 months. If I waited eight weeks, it would be 75% off.
Why should the fine be based on that?
Because they’re fining based on the legality of one specific trick, so it makes sense to dis-incentivise that specific trick by fining the entire profit made off that specific trick (plus some).
But you can’t quantify how much that trick earned them. How many customers went to Canadian Tire to buy that item, and then also bought others things while they were there? Would those customers have gone to Canadian Tire otherwise without that “sale”? Were they incentivized to spend even more because they thought they were saving money with that “sale”?
You responded to someone saying it’s really difficult to quantify by asking why they should even base the fine off this quantification. I explained why, and your response is, “yeah but it’s too hard to quantify.” No shit Sherlock.
My point was, why does that matter? They profited from false advertising; fine their total profits.
Sure, that’s an easier way of doing it. I don’t really have a problem with that except that it can easily kill a business to fine their total profits if the period is long enough.
Why should I care that a business which was breaking the law gets fined into nonexistence? Like, of course I feel for the workers, it’s not most of their faults, but if we believe in the free market then another will fill that gap.
Imo fining all profits made by using misleading practices is just as disincentivising without introducing the instability that immediate business death brings. I’m gonna stop trying to convince you of this though, I think we just differ on some fundamentals.
I’m confident someone has done a price model comparing doing these “fake sales” vs. “real sales” vs. “no sales”, ergo it is possible to quantify the damages. Smart/big businesses don’t make decisions without doing the math first and then testing the price strategy, and that diligence could have been used against them to determine damages.