false advertising

I'm completely fed up with grocery store advertisements (which are really nothing more than an extension of the more general corporate hype that falls just short of outright lies--when it doesn't cross the line from the start). Do they really think, when they advertise a product as selling for four for nine dollars with a coupon for fifty cents off (which gets doubled), that I'm not going to bother with doing the math? Or, worse, do they actually believe that selling an item two-for-one without advertising the actual price is going to dupe me into believing that they haven't jacked the price up to nearly twice its previous cost to compensate for the one "free" item you're getting is going to trick me into believing that I'm really getting one whole item free? Or even worse, when they advertise the savings of a "buy one get one free" item as $6.48, do they really not know that I can calculate the actual price as $3.24 and understand that last week's price at $2.98 means that this is not in fact a sale, but a price increase? In fact, the large majority of the items listed in stores' "sales" flyers are not really sales at all, but either the regular item price or are discounted only by pennies.

These advertising "techniques" offend me. They suggest to me that stores think I'm stupid. Maybe these ads do con some (stupid) people into believing they are getting some kind of great bargain, but if they do, is it right that the stores take advantage of people's ignorance in this way? What's wrong, I'd like to know, with simply stating the price of a single item outright, with no complicated mathematical formula to work out? That way buyers would be able to detect immediately who has the cheapest prices and a true competitive marketplace would prevail. Oh...excuse me; that is what's wrong with it. Can't have any of that kind of truly competitive capitalist stuff going on. That would be a betrayal of our great system of corporate pseudo-capitalism.

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