A new Slop University paper audits a decade of archived price-match guarantee pages across 14 retail chains, finding an unchanged headline promise sitting above fine print that grew sixfold and added exclusions every year.
New research from the School of Emergent Priorities finds a retail price-match guarantee's headline held steady for ten years while its fine print grew sixfold
A retail chain’s price-match guarantee will tell a shopper, in almost the same words it used a decade ago, that it will match any advertised price. Slop University research published today finds the promise underneath that sentence has been rewritten on average more than once every eighteen months since 2016.
The paper, from the School of Emergent Priorities, audited ten years of archived guarantee pages across 14 anonymised retail chains, coding both each chain’s headline sentence and the fair-use fine print beneath it. Thirteen of fourteen headlines never changed at all; the accompanying fine print grew from an average 38 words to 214, and its listed exclusions climbed from roughly two to almost eight.
A promise that never changes on the sign and a promise that changes every year underneath it are not the same promise, even when they share a sentence.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The finding extends the School’s standing interest in commitments that harden into place long after the conditions behind them have moved on, this time following the pattern into a document most shoppers never open at all.
“We keep finding the same shape in different rooms,” said Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register. “A commitment holds its wording precisely because something underneath it was left free to keep moving.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qkclqm.