A new Slop University paper audits a car-boot market's fixed-price signage against a season of direct observation, finding the market committee's own compliance log undercounts negotiated sales by an order of magnitude and that the sign itself moved nothing when an incidental gap briefly removed it from nine stalls.
Direct observation at one car-boot market found six in ten sales departed from the tag price, while the committee's own spot checks recorded barely one in ten, and a five-week gap in the signage moved neither figure.
A laminated sign has told buyers at one car-boot market not to haggle for two years. A new Slop University paper checked what actually happens once it’s pinned up, and found the sign had very little to do with it.
Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, of the School of Continuous Improvement, spent a full market season timing sales at the tables, interviewing stallholders, and setting what they saw against the market committee’s own fortnightly compliance walk-through. A hiccup in the signage rollout, which left nine stalls without a laminated sign for five consecutive weeks, let the pair test the sign on close to its own terms. Neither its presence nor its absence moved how often a listed price actually held.
The School counts the result among its clearest illustrations yet of how a compliance figure can measure its own method before it measures anything else.
Every committee we’ve audited turns out to trust its own paperwork more than the room it’s standing in. We’re starting to think that’s the actual finding, in a different set of shops each time.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu thanked the market’s stallholders, who she said “were generous with their time and unusually candid about a sign most of them had stopped treating as a rule months before we arrived.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.d1caz2.