The Price Written on a Screen: A Number Stripped of Context

Between the tag in a shop window and the price on a screen lies an invisible but important difference: the tag in the window is seen by those who walk in; the price written on a screen is announced to the whole world — to the competitor, to the seller in the next province, to the buyer who finds it through a search engine three years later. And an announced number cannot be taken back: once written on a screen, a price settles into minds as the product’s “real worth”.

What a single number hides

The price of an industrial product is never only the product’s price. Inside it sits the stock waiting on a dealer’s shelf; the needs conversation held before the sale, the experience that steers toward the right model; the answered phone on the day the product stops, the nearness of a spare part. The single number on a screen makes all these layers invisible — and the cheapest number is usually the one that contains none of them. When a buyer sets two prices side by side, they are comparing not two products but two packages, one of them stripped bare.

Nobody is left at the end of the auction

Two sellers of the same product undercutting each other’s screen price looks, in the short term, like the buyer’s gain. In time the picture turns: the melting margin first thins the stock, then the pre-sale labour, and last the accountability on the day of failure. We wrote before about why the broth loses its taste when no meat is left on the bone; the screen auction is the very fire under that pot. In the end the losers are not only the sellers — the reputation of a sector stripped of its service layers returns to the buyer as an invoice at their next purchase.

Our choice: a price is told to its counterpart

So on our side we apply a simple rule: we do not write our campaign prices on screens. This is not a game of secrecy — we work with a plain and transparent price list, we stage no bargaining theatre, and every colleague who asks for a price receives the answer the same day. What we decline to display is not the number itself but the number stripped of its context. A price gains its meaning where the need is discussed: which door, what usage intensity, what installation conditions, what labour stands behind it. The address of that conversation is clear — the dealer in your region, or us directly.

The screen exists for the catalogue; the number, for the conversation. Everyone who keeps that order — manufacturer, dealer and buyer — rises from the same table having gained.