For instance, lowering the price of something doesn't necessarily increase sales - it can decrease sales if say
the consumer believes it's cheaper because it's an inferior product.

So sometimes increasing the price is the way to go to increase sales.

So the price operates in weird ways; what about other things. If the product is placed next to more expensive items it could do a number of things.

For instance, it could be a decoy product and increase the sales of the adjacent item. Or perhaps the adjacent item could be a decoy product.

And what about numbers? Pricing things ending in 9s perform better. Selling things at $39 tend to do better then lower numbers like $34 or $37 because of the 9.

And then there's the packaging and placement itself. Tall or wide packaging of the same volume emote different signals and respond differently to prices - look at the great variety of how bottled water is packaged next time you're at the store.

Then there's the quantity on a shelf at any given time. Sometimes intentionally overstocking the shelves will increase sales as consumers will take more than they need, sometimes understocking will creating anxiety that the product won't be available when needed. Depends on the product, the buyer, the conditions of the market, lots of things.

Then there's the brand itself. Depending on the market you're in, a name brand can either help or hurt you. In some markets, the name brand is associated with premium pricing and poor value so it doesn't carry your product; in other markets it's just the opposite.

And then there's discounts and sales. In some stores you want to never have a sale, ever. In other stores you want to barrage your shoppers with a complicated array of perpetually churning sales.

And what about sales, there's an artificial price that gets advertised before the actual one; nobody is paying the higher price, so it can more or less be chosen arbitrarily. You can mark your bubblegum as 99.99% off from being $10,000, but then the illusion is broken.

Instead, what sales do is they give the perception of a higher price signal through the presentation of the sale without actually charging the price.

That's why when you go into clothing stores they'll say the product was $95 or whatever and what luck, through many discounts it's now only $30. Well they all sold at about $30, we know that, but the product decoy pricing itself tries to capture both worlds.

This is just honestly just a tiny bit of how demand actually works. It's a vast study.

The point is that people aren't mechanical rational automotons without any strategy or agency who respond to prices through unconscious reflexes. Nor do they have perfect information or maximize their utility value through arbitrarily complex deductions and always choose the most optimum outcome.

Things are totally messy and the classical models are about as accurate as saying "winter brings cold weather and summer brings hot". Sure, in general. But on any specific day it's non predictive.

A $10,000 pack of gum will likely perform poorly. But if you hyped the heck out of it and made it really unique, you might even sell out your inventory of that alarmingly quickly because humans are weird like that.

Proof? Let me introduce you to Palessi https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gaNq-rOkI