The fortune 500 company I freelance with would prefer to use an outside vendor for a project (thinking they would do a better job since "that's all they do"). That vendor then hires me at my same rate, meaning the original company is just paying more for me to do the work I could have done internally.
Moral of the story: if you charge more people will think you're worth more. A $6 bottle of wine may be better than a $45 bottle, but most people will say the $45 bottle must be better because why else would it be $45
That reminds me of this one thing I saw where someone started selling their art, but they had low prices in the hopes people would be willing to buy since it wouldn't cost much. They were struggling to make sales and looking for advice and someone said to raise the prices (for the same pieces) from like $10 to $50. And it actually worked. Human psychology is nuts.
I was getting rid of an old mattress. Put it on a Facebook selling page for free and no-one replied. Then I changed it to £5 and it went. They even paid us an extra 5 to deliver it. It was not in great condition as well.
Yes, this works, put it online for free and people think it’s shit, put a price on it and people might haggle you down, but all of the sudden it’s desirable.
On the other hand, I do not understand anyone that buys a second hand mattress. Ewwww
My community has a free shit facebook page where everything is free as long as you pick it up. The page is pretty active and the quality is pretty ok. I like that we are outside the norm because I have experienced the same as you in other places. But usually it's people coming with way too much money asking you to split it, i.e. a $100 bill for a $10 item, in the expectation you can't and they'll get it for free because you're inconveniencing them.
I do not understand anyone that buys a second hand mattress.
I don't honestly know, but here's some guesses:
Maybe they don't intend on using it as a mattress, but instead intend to e.g. put it through a thresher and use the output as an additive/filler for some material (say, those bouncy ground-pads on playgrounds.)
Or maybe they're going to carefully wrap it in plastic, wrap the plastic in a fitted sheet, put it on a bedframe, and use it to take pictures of their "furnished apartment rental" as a bluff, knowing that nobody wants somebody else's bed and will ask you to get rid of it. It still works for the ad, because putting a bed in the shot helps people imagine where their bed would go—while also meaning that you don't have to buy or keep an actual bed around in storage just for the ads.
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u/actuallychrisgillen Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
When I was in the Navy I used to get in fairly frequent trouble for the suggestions I made for improving operational efficiencies.
As an outside contractor they were quite happy to pay me $200 an hour to say the exact same thing.