The FINANCIAL — Sales are the best time to snap up a bargain. Sales periods are common in almost every country. But Georgia is an exception when it comes to sales in its shops.
Tbilisi recently hosted its first ever shopping festival. Tbilisi City Hall asked all shops to offer customers significant sales as they do in other countries. But the shops in Tbilisi only offered small discounts. There are two types of shops: those which are quite expensive and which the average resident of Tbilisi can’t afford to shop in, and those which are more or less affordable for the average citizen. The most expensive shops, which really need to offer discounts, only offered small sales. This is an unfair attitude toward Georgian consumers. They almost never have the chance to buy good quality clothes or shoes made by their favourite brands. In general however Georgians tend to shop a lot. The shops which do have low prices always have a lot of clients and frequently have to order new stock.
The majority of Tbilisi residents think that the first shopping festival was not a success. Mayor of Tbilisi Gigi Ugulava intensively encouraged all the shops to have big discounts, but even this didn’t result in a real shopping festival with lots of happy buyers. City Hall can’t interfere further into the operations of private businesses however. They called for big sales, but as it turned out, all in vain.
Unfortunately shops in Tbilisi have very strange sales practices during Christmas, summer and other sales periods.
Some shops sneakily increase the prices of their items before announcing a sale and as a result the prices remain high during the sale period as well. Official representatives of worldwide brands usually abstain from such dishonesty. In this country some shops announce sales of for example up to 30 percent. But the 30 percent sale is for old stock and the items which are left are not in popular colours or a lot of sizes. For new collections and stylish items the discounts are very small and don’t alter the prices significantly at all.
When an item is already on sale and the shop announces a new sale. Shop representatives reset the discount according to the original price, not the already discounted one. But this is wrong as well. When an item is on sale and the shop has another sale, the discount has to be cut from the already slashed price and not the original one. But shops in Tbilisi never do this.
Another strange thing that occurs during sales, is keeping popular items in storage while the sale is going on. Lots of shops keep the most stylish items in the back during the sales. If a customer asks for a certain item which isn’t on show, shop consultants say that they have run out. But after the sales period is over, those items are being sold in the shop again, but not at sale prices obviously.
For these reasons shops in Tbilisi have many unsatisfied clients. But on the other hand shop representatives argue that the real cost of the clothes and other items is actually quite high. The cost of transportation, customs fee and other costs have to added to the real cost. As a result the final sales price becomes quite high and that’s also why shops apparently can’t afford to offer significant discounts.
But this is just what shop representatives claim. In reality the prices aren’t as high as they allege. People working at customs say that they import everything for very low prices. The average real cost of an item of clothing is 20 USD (35 GEL). But later they are sold for an average of 150 GEL in the shops. Shops do not want to offer significant sales even during shopping festivals and Christmas or summer sales periods.
All of this results in few sales at shops and many unsatisfied customers in the country. Such situations are not beneficial for anyone. But customers can’t change anything at their end. In the end it all depends on what the shop representatives themselves decide to do.
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