Very briefly. In 2005, I worked for Sears. In the early morning hours, I would change signs advertising 40% off of a ridiculous "nobody would pay that much" retail price, and put up signs offering 50% of that price. A few days later, I'd go out and replace the 40% signs. It occurred to me pretty quickly that if we got rid of my department, and all the signs and the flyers sent out in newspapers, we could just sell the crap for 60% off of that inflated retail price, and make more money in the process.
But no, Sears has to play some little mind game with the shopping public, to pretend that they're getting some fantastic deal. I guess I developed a bit of counter-contempt for retailers in the process.
It doesn't matter, in ten years, most of what you and I will buy in the non-perishable goods arena will likely be online. Even clothing.
No-you couldn’t. The retailer I work for DID cut out all of the advertisements a few years back. There are a lot of costs associated with running a retailer that people never see unless you’ve been a store manager at least or even better work for corporate management (like I do). For example, credit card fees last year were half as much as our net profit—and we run a bottom line of almost 6% which is huge in our industry. If you want to see how profitable they are, you can always look at some of their info on a lot of finance websites. Most run in the 1-4% net margin range (after all expenses are paid).