The Trend Toward US Businesses Offering $1 Products Accelerates
It has begun to dawn on more and more large companies that high-priced goods are costing them sales during the recession. Maybe the only way for them to hold onto customers is to offer some products at remarkably low prices,…
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The benefit of $1 items is that it keeps consumers coming back to brands which they have bought for decades but may no longer be able to afford. It also keep sales coming, even if those sales are very modest.
The $1 meal from McDonald’s (MCD) has been part of the company’s marketing for some time. Starbuck’s (SBUX) now offers instant coffee for about $1. Wal-Mart (WMT) announced during its last earnings call that it would have entire aisles in its stores with nothing but products priced at or under $1.
A recent report from USA Today shows that the $1 price concept has moved to the marketing programs of more and more companies. Kraft (KFT)is offering cheese products that allow customers to make $1 cheeseburgers. Campbell’s (CPB) is testing $1 condensed soup.
If things get worse in the car industry, the price of a new vehicle could drop to $1, or, at the very least GM (GM) and Chrysler could offer autos for a $1 down payment.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
