Amazon had their ‘Prime Days’ last week and their site was filled with banners offering ‘Up to 40% off’, ‘Up to 30% off’, ‘As low as $xx’. Of course, these phrases promise exactly nothing. You probably won’t get the 40% or 30% off and may get no discount at all.
It’s a deceptive and widely used marketing practice. A famous auto insurance company has been advertising ‘save as much as 15%’ for years and they’re not the only ones. If the savings promised by the auto insurance industry were real, then by switching from one to the other repeatedly, your rate would go down to zero!
Advocacy organizations use this technique all the time: ‘Up to 8 million may starve…sea levels may rise by 20 feet…eating bacon/cheese/lettuce/chocolate/beer may shorten your life by up to 300 years’.
Of course all of these numbers are meaningless. The only thing we can be sure of when someone tells us that ‘up to 8 million may starve’ is that the number will certainly be less than 8 million and possibly zero. They use these big numbers either to grab our attention or out of laziness. I wish they would stop.
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