blonde poker forum

Its the first year this one has troubled me.

It started on Xmas day, by some strange lapse in taste I happened to have ITV on in the evening and of course the inevitable adverts crop up in every break.

These invite you to give up your boxing day morning to go and buy a sofa, usually for £399.

Then on boxing day itself I was in the car on the way to a sporting fixture when I had to pass the retail park. My passage was delayed at the roundabout by queues and queues of cars trying to get into the car park. The retail park consists of

- FurnitureLand
- Harveys (Furniture)
- DFS
- Carpetright
- KFC
- McDonalds

Allowing for some people no doubt being unable to go more than 48 hours without a KFC or a McDonalds then I have to face the fact that hundreds of people wanted to buy furniture, and more particularly sofas, on Boxing Day

Now I decided to analyse this. Of course if you have recently moved home you might need a new sofa. Perhaps the replacement cycle for sofas has accelerated and they now need replacing more frequently. Beyond that, I began to struggle. I turned to my 10 year old and asked him.

His reply was redolent of one who knows me all too well

"Dad, please don't worry about it, I don't know the reason"

However, good blondeites, you should be able to humour me with answers to the following:

- Why, in the morning on Boxing Day, would you be queueing to buy furniture?

- What is it about those adverts that makes you think "Oooohhhh £399 I must have a new sofa"?

- How often do you buy a new sofa?

- What is it about the British psyche that means you just have to go to the sales?

I await your answers with interest.
 
 

I hink we need JAmes the Sofa King to answer this

because multitudes of people don't buy a sofa in the 3 months preceeding xmas because they know they can get a 'bargain' on boxing day. My girlfriends brother bought one yesterday incidentally, £1200 reduced from £2300, brilliant.

I have never bought a sofa....

lol Tighty i have been having a similar rant!

All i could figure is people wait till now to buy them as they know they are cheaper, the question is why do the sofa companies use this time of the year?

I wondered if it was partly a 'new year, new look' thing but there appears to be no rational reason to it.

I want the mystery solved aswell!

I understand there is pent up demand..if you move in Oct, you might as well wait til after Xmas for the bargain. Fully understood.


my real query I suppose is..where does the Boxing day demand come from year after year? how often do people replace sofas?

Well not everyone is replacing them tighty! The number of first time buyers is surely quite high each year with the growth in population, couple that with replacement sofa's people need when their current ones either break or become 'ugly'

I am sure it is not 90% of the population going out buying a new sofa!

Im going to go buy a sofa today after work... seriously.

Maybe people rush out and buy them so the adverts don't continue to run?  There's only so much of the very smooth, but slightly disturbing, Martin Kemp talking about bargain sofas that anyone can take.

my guess would be that shops know that people receive money for Christmas now sometimes instead of presents, so they are competing with each other to try and win the business of all these people who've all received money and have no ideas on what to spend it on.

I have a friend who moved into a new house 3 weeks ago, he's been staying at another friends house for the last 3 weeks because he refused to buy stuff to furnish his house because he knew if he hung on til this week he'd save a fortune :D

but it doesnt make any sense - DFS etc have sales on for 11 1/2 months of the year. You are not getting anymore of a bargain than you were say at the end of october.

There is absolutely no way that a shop is going to sell volumes of a product at half of its original price, unless the original price has been artificially inflated. Its a big con, and the consumer falls for it every time.

Incidentally the quality of product has gone thru the floor in recent years. More and more imports from the east (where they can produce and ship a leather suite for around £200) has seen manufacturers in europe cut costs to try and compete.  You will be lucky to get 3 years normal use out of one now.

Yeah this one makes me laugh - the advert comes on saying "DFS the last week of the winter sale, massive savings to be found in store" and the reason its the last week isnt because the prices will go up the following week its because its the start of "THE NEW DFS SPRING SALE"........ where they just try and flog whatever didnt sell in the winter sale :D

Tighty - I used to work for a very large Sofa company and the question of how often do people REALLY need to buy sofa's baffled me also. On the question of incesant sales, it is really a big con.   The company in question had about 6 massive sales per year, the consumers were told the sofa's were Double Discount or ?% off etc!  The reality is that the price quoted as the original price was NEVER the original price. 

I asked how they got away this and they said the price is listed somewhere as a recommended price in some catalogue or other but they never used that anyway.  It is there in black and white though in case a customer asked to see the original price.  Disgusting!

A sofa is for life.

Our two leather cream ( ewww ) sofas are knackered , what with the little ones .
Paul wont buy anymore yet tho  ;grr; ;grr; ;grr; i want brown leather now ( hint hint )

Lots of people have elderly relatives round for christmas.

They'll spend lots of time on the sofa.

Elderly people often have incontinence problems.

Large queues outside sofa emporiums.

"you do the math?"

Not all old folks are incontinent.

lol hey cat, sharpen up your table football skills son

I represented my County at Table Football.

You are welcome for a game if you are down for the Brighton fessie.

We call it bar footie round here and i had a misspent youth :D

....which is when?

I always thought a company quoting an original price had to have the product being sold for that price somewhere in the country in one of their stores, for at least 30 days.

Otherwise they're just being naughty.

Auction houses are the place to buy sofas. You could get a new one every week for the prices you get there.

should we not have a post a picture of your sofa thread?

22nd-28th Jan

For a purist like you the comps you would like would be Tue 23rd, £100 with 1 rebuy. £300 FO on the thursday, £200 on the Friday and a £500 DC on the saturday.





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Purist?.......

Avoiding the rebuys!

i am here to help with this crock of chit.
right
the busiest time to buy a sofa is easter>>>then January
the adds you see on TV are a big sham,
the adds will always state when you get to the shop you must have that colour and that style ,,
normally the sofa if a crazy £399 price and the chairs are £379 each (they never put the chairs on TV Lil)
these massive companies do their b0ll0x on these £399 sofas as i know exactly what they cost to make or bring in from the east or Europe.
i know this from being in the game for the last 15 years,from selling them on a market to a massive  sofa clearance warehouse.
i can buy sofas cheaper than what they cost to make (why)
a lot of sofa companies go bust every week around the world due to the above,
where sofas are in transit (shipping) to be dropped at certain ports,these sofas have to be sold before they dock as storage for these items soon depreciate quickly,and styles too,not just me but a lot of companies around the country jump in quick buying this stock up cheap,but they (not me)dont really pass this on to the customer...sometime this could be 60 containers each one holding 26-32 suites in ,i will probably never serve anyone on here so it doesn't really matter but these suites are 100%full grain leather this is go gear stuff for say dfs/mfi/next. the real rrp is say £1400 for a nice suite this would cost mfi/dfs/next aprox £600-£700 inc shipping ...well when the suites get cancelled i buy them for about £375-£450 then sell them as stolen suites for £600-£700..............dont tell anyone.....a lot of traders like me do this all over the country all taking a piece of the pie from the agents who first started off with 60 containers......

there are some really chit suites out there around the £599=£699 mark these are really chit most are made in poland or Thailand(real leather but chit)
mind you some of the suite i get are destined for next and they are from Thailand good gear...

mind you if i were to buy a suite
i would go for one which is made in the UK
pay 0 for a year
then intrest free for 5 years
and take OUT EXTENDED WARRANTY

then after 9 months scream my tits of that the suite is Shiite
and i put my hand on my heart and say 95% of you will get a brand new suite or money back...this is a massive issue at the moment and has been for the past 10 years dont know why but these big companies tend to swap/or give money back just coz you shout at them...
 they call these slight seconds/returns/full off chit they are used suites/second hand....

any advice on buying a sofa pm "sofa----king" i dont wanna sell you a sofa just give you advice and tell you where in the country to buy a bargain coz i wholesale to most of them... lol gl ......

Blimey so you really are a sofa king!

lmao well done

Subuteo or foosball ?

I'll take my chances at Subuteo ;starwars;

I'm convinced the ads on tv are posed by small people sitting on sofas to make them look bigger, just like they have actors  with small hands to advertise burger king.

foosball

Intersting, I've never thought about it that way before.


The good Lord wasn't kind enough to bless me with dainty digits, so it's unlikely that I'll get a gig punting burgers any time soon.

It's 6.20am and I'm now considering getting a manicure and re-inventing myself, with my podgy paddles, as a mobile phone model.

The law needs changing imo.

How do these companies get away with "Sale ends Saturday" only for a "new" sale to start the following monday?

Do they change the price by a penny? Or alternate which stock is on "sale"?

Then again, thinking about it, who actually believes the "sale ends sunday" bollox anyway!!!

The hundreds of people literally queuing up to ;get in'!

the trick for these companies is to make you think that a sofa/suite is something you will always be paying for - sya 50 quid a month. Once you have paid off one, the natural thing is then to go and buy another, because you can then just continue to pay your 50 quid a month, instead of actually looking at what you have got and working out if you really do need a new one.

its a lot like the car industry in the resepect.

When I think of sofa's for sale, I can't help but be annoyed by Martin Kemp grinning in his TV adverts trying to sell them. If at some point in the future I want to buy a sofa, I will go out of my way not to buy the ones advertised in those ads with him in them. They are really irritating