When is the Next Brooks Brothers Sale? - Page 247

I'm thinking of buying a pair of the BB Red Wing Iron Rangers, but am wondering if I should hold off for a sale.  Are those one of the "standard exclusions," or would those generally go on sale along with everything else? 30% can be quite a chunk of change.

Are the 2/1699 deals permanently gone on suits, or just temporarily removed?

You can get similar Red Wings on Amazon for $200 or so after discounts. If you sign up for the Amazon Shoe subscription emails, you get 20% off your first pair of shoes that are bought from Amazon itself (cannot be third party sellers). I have to admit that the options, in terms of color, are different so the ones on Amazon might not be the ones you want. The BB ones are a beauty, but they certainly do cost a chunk of money.

Head up guys, some of newer BB Peal shoes went up by $50.00. These were $598.00 recently now they are $648.00

http://www.brooksbrothers.com/Peal-Co.%C2%AE-Double-Monk-Strap-Shoes/MH00231,default,pd.html?dwvar_MH00231_Color=BLCK&contentpos=31&cgid=0522

Jesus, the Peal shoes just went up last year from $528 to $598. Hard to swallow when they are exactly the same shoes increasing in price by nearly 25% in ~12 months. And they weren't exactly priced too low to begin with.

People need to start complaining, that is a ridiculous hike if it happens every year.

That or just not buy at retail and wait for a sale.

The more frequent sales are why these hikes occur.

Wrong.

How so?

Our economy is in a state of stagflation similar to the mid-1970s. Prices are rising because the Fed is flooding the world with money and monetizing the US debt (its most recent purchase from Primary Dealers was for Treasury instruments issued only two weeks prior). The housing crash and an accounting trick called "hedonics" are masking inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The largest component of CPI (a bit under 25% weighting) is something called "Owner's Equivalent Rent", wherein the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls up homeowners and asks them "if you were to put your house up for rent, how much would you expect to charge". Obviously as housing prices have fallen, so has the wild-ass-guess called OER. Hedonics comes from the same root as the word "hedonism", and is a measurement of the "pleasure" derived from a product. Using hedonics, BLS has declared that the replacement of the iPad with the iPad 2 at the same price is deflationary, as is the replacement of a $299 27" CRT television with a $1000 plasma screen.

Meanwhile the costs of basic foodstuffs - sugar, flour, milk, etc. - have increased anywhere from 70% to 250% since 2008. As have Brooks Brothers shoes.

I was fine with your analysis up until the final few sentences. I think it's a stretch to tie 25% YOY increases in BB Peal shoe prices to core inflation. First, because the BB increase is outpacing core inflation by a big margin. Second, because Peal shoes are a luxury good (maybe not Robb Report, capital-L luxury, but luxury in as much as they're priced in what must be the 95th percentile of men's dress shoes in the country).

A more likely explanation of the BB price hikes is that, well, the high-end market can bear it. The fact is, our economy is sharply bimodal, and depending on the scope of your analysis, arguably even more polymodal. The luxury goods markets have been booming for years now. Other consumer markets? Not so much. My guess is tha BB sells the majority of its Peals to the highly affluent, and the highly affluent are doin' just fine.

Now, if the prices of -all- BB dress shoes were going up by roughly the same margin YOY, I think you'd be onto something. But AFAIK, it's just their Peals.

An alternative hypothesis would be that most of the Peals are made in the UK, and there might be import and COGS factors involved. But these seem insufficient to account for such steady price hikes. (Good way to test this hypothesis: have the prices of other A. Sargent and Crockett & Jones shoes been increasing dramatically YOY?)

His analysis is, to put it mildly, severely lacking.  To the extent that the OER is gaming inflation, by his analysis we should've seen runaway inflation in the mid-2000s, when the housing market was overheated.  Did we?  No.  Ah, but now that the housing market has collapsed, the OER is hiding all the inflation that we see in... nothing but food staples and Peal & Co. shoes?  Uh, no.  

 

Food staples have seen rising prices because environmental factors are straining supply (the turbulent weather of the last few years has produced record low crops of cattle, grain, corn, fruit, etc.) and an ever increasing population is juicing demand.  Peal & Co. shoes, conversely, have increased in price because BB knows they can sell just as many on a 10% hike.

 

And on that point, some of the math in this discussion is sloppy.  The price increase on Peals from $528 to $598 is a hike of about 12%, and the increase from $598 to $648 is a hike of 10%.  That is nowhere near 25% YoY (it's not even 25% in all), and not all that much considering the price of Peals from 2008-2012 was stagnant or close to it.  (What was the price before $528, $499?  That was a hike of 5%).

 

Given that the corporate discount sale has increased from 25% to 30%, and there are ever more opportunities to claim discount prices, they're not going to leave base prices stagnant.

 

One other thing to point out, as the resale market becomes more robust, it increases prices because the value of the good has risen.  This is why textbooks are outrageously priced, and one reason why the cost of video games has increased in the last decade.  In other words, the easier it is for SF members to sell their shoes on eBay or where have you, the more BB can charge to sell you a new pair.

due to price increase, even @ 35% discount, you'd be better off ordering from C&J directly