Wanna know a funny thing about markups? Yes, it does seem that TRU Canada is marking up the LOTR sets a bit.. the SW sets seem to be matching what LEGO.com is selling them for, but not so with the LOTR. I was returning something at TRU the other day - next time anyone is there, see if you can see the screen that comes up at their customer service desk - A manager was there, and I overheard him saying: "I can give it to you for $25" I looked over and saw a couple of ladies buying something that was out of a box or something. My ears pricked up, because I was wondering how he came up with that number. I don't know how, but I glanced over and saw the monitor, and my eye went right to the upper right-corner of the screen and it said 'M/U: 63%'. I used to work as a manager for a large international retailer, and I know that I could easily access the markup information for any article that we sold, that's how we decided how low we could go on dicsounts at sale time.Case909 wrote:If it's an error, there is no law that Toys R Us is required to honour the price. Usually large companies will honour 1 item at the erroneous price to make customers happy and provide good service. I have seen large companies decline to honour prices when it costs them big time (like advertising a TV at $79.99 when it's supposed to be $799.99). At this price, assuming it's an error, $100 is lost on each item. The gross margin on these things is probably around 25%, so it costs $135 to TRU. That's a loss of $55 per item, times 1000 orders, that's $55,000. I'd say TRU can afford to pay that for their error since their annual profits must be in the billions of dollars.
SO in a nutshell, you see tons of US postings about TRU jacking the prices up. In Canada it's not as bad, but they are making a KILLING. Long story short.. they had better honour that error, their gross margins are way higher than 25%!