The one that does not work

There is a stall in a Muscat mall corridor that sells charging cables, and each kind comes at three prices.

The middle one does what a cable should do. The top one is sturdier and comes with a better plug. The bottom one is a fraction of the price, and it will charge a phone for about a week before it starts working only at a certain angle, and then not at all.

Shoppers pick up the bottom one all the time. It feels like a win at the till.

For most everyday products, the contest to be cheapest is already over. Somebody found the lowest price at which the thing still does its job, and that is roughly where the sensible floor sits. Below it, nothing useful is left to remove. Every further saving comes out of the part that makes it work.

So the cheaper option is not really a cheaper version of the same thing. It is a different thing, one that fails, and the money spent on it is mostly lost. The customer who bought it saved a little and then bought the middle one anyway.

For a seller, that changes the promise worth making. One promise is that you will pay less than anyone else and be sorry. The other is that you will pay a bit more than you wanted and be glad, every time you pick it up.

The second one is harder to put on a sign. It is also the only one that brings people back.

The danger of chasing the lowest price is not that you might lose. It is that you might get there.