Walking down to Stumptown on a wet morning in the middle of October, I counted four windows on one block advertising Black Friday pricing. In October. One of them had already been running the same sign since the end of September, which means it was not a sale, it was the price with a costume on.
By this week the discounts are deeper still. Forty off, fifty off, an extra twenty at checkout, free shipping with no threshold. Everyone came out of the last two years having ordered too much of everything, and now the warehouses have to be emptied before January.
I understand the math. Carrying cost is real, and a markdown you take in November hurts less than one you take in February.
Here is the part that gets lost. Every markdown is also a message, and the message is being received by people who are already watching prices very closely because groceries and rent have taught them to.
A discount does not just move a unit, it teaches your customer what your product is actually worth, and that lesson outlives the quarter it was taken in.
Teach it often enough and you have trained an entire base to never buy at full price again. They are not disloyal. They are correct. You told them the number and then you told them the number was negotiable, and they believed the second thing because you said it more recently and more loudly.
The brands holding the line are doing something specific. Patagonia has spent years being famously unhelpful about discounts, to the point of running an ad telling you not to buy the jacket, and the result is that the price on the tag is the price in your head. Costco keeps the hot dog at a dollar fifty because the number is the brand, not the margin. Salt & Straw does not run a two for one in November. It runs a Thanksgiving flavor lineup, and people stand in the rain for it.
That is the real alternative to discounting, and it is not a pricing tactic. It is having a reason to exist that survives contact with a cheaper option. Scarcity, timing, craft, a thing you cannot get in January. Give people a reason that is not the number and the number stops being the whole conversation.
They are not disloyal. They are correct.
If you have to discount this season, discount like you mean it once, not like a nervous person adjusting a sign every nine days.
Portland is doing its November thing, dark by half past four, rain that never quite commits. I bought a sweater last week at full price because I needed a sweater. Somewhere a pricing manager would like a word.