I try hard not to use this soapbox for personal customer service issues with retailers. And honestly, even though I know myself to be one tough customer (I just know too much for my own good), I have had few issues bad enough to worth bringing up in this public square.

However, sometimes things happen to me personally that make me wonder how other customers feel, and how many other retailers are falling into this trap, and that’s when I have no doubt that my customer service event is worthy of an article. So here we go.

Last week my daughter turned eight years old. This was a climactic event for her not because she is now a year older but because she is now of a sufficient size to shop at Justice, the store “everyone” shops at, according to her. She has been waiting for this event for about two years now.

She received a gift card from her grandfather and insisted that we go the very next day. So my family of four piled into the car and drove to the mall. My husband and son went to the Lego store, conveniently located right across from the Justice store that my daughter and I entered. The first thing I noticed (and how could I not?) was that the entire store was 40% off. But only if you had a coupon.

Without the 40%, the prices (at least for me, call me cheap if you like, but hey, I just know too much) were eye-popping. $60+ for a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie — for an 8-year-old? I don’t think I would pay that much for those items for me. Granted, it was drenched in glitter, but still. That was when I realized the other side of the problem of heavy discounting, and it is why my experience at Justice is worth sharing with you.

My daughter was a first-time customer. She didn’t have a coupon. It wasn’t until we were about to walk out the door without spending anything that a store associate asked if we needed any help and I said that we were a first-time customer with a gift card that suddenly everything changed. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You won’t the need the coupon. We’ll take care of you. But you’ll definitely want to register your email so that you can get the coupon in the future. It’s really the only way to shop here.” That’s what she said.

Two problems: one, my price image for Justice has already been set. I now think of them as even more expensive than shopping for kids clothes at Macy’s or Dillards, or even Gymboree. And the store may be merchandised to appeal to tweens, but it’s tweens’ moms that are actually shelling out the cash, and frankly, the store was just too junky looking to make me feel like I was buying a pair of girl’s sweatpants that were worth $38.

Two, I have no idea what the hurdle is for achieving the 40% off coupon — and that’s a big problem. It clearly is “the only way to shop” the store — it’s the only way to afford to buy things that will only last one season before my kid grows out of them anyway! But I doubt my daughter’s $50 gift card spend will be enough to get her to whatever that hurdle may be. That means that I’m going to have to invest at the full price level for some undetermined amount of time before I can be qualified as a valuable-enough customer to get the eagerly-awaited 40% off coupon via email.

And it gets enforced — there was a woman in front of me in the register line who had a daughter who was clearly at the upper end of the Justice size range, and she didn’t have the magic coupon, and the girl behind the register was in no way going to give them 40% off of anything. In fact, it was nearly a customer service event all on its own.

There are a lot of potential drawbacks to a loyalty program that relies on heavy discounting. And there are a lot of challenges with the high initial price / big discount strategy that more and more retailers seem trapped in. But here’s one that I had never experienced, and for it to happen at a retailer like Justice — where there is a clear entry market of 7-8 year old girls, and a clear exit point (where they just move on down to Forever 21 right next door) — seems like a huge oversight on their part.

That drawback is this: how do new customers feel? Everyone complains that retailers spend too much time and money trying to acquire new customers and not enough retaining them. But what happens when you go too far in the other direction? A retailer like Justice has one real shot at a limited age group that is going to grow out of them before they know it. They need a constant replenishment of new customers, to make up for the ones that they lose at the other end of the size/age scale. And this 40% off coupon thing seems like a huge barrier to entry to new customers.

Maybe I’m just a cheap, over-sensitive mom when it comes to this, but as a retail analyst, I was startled. I was surprised that any company would allow there to be a hurdle – however insidiously it got there, and I can see that this was probably a gradual thing — to be raised between themselves and new customers. Yet another sign, in my mind, that pricing — particularly in apparel — has simply spiraled out of control.

Customers are irrational when it comes to high initial prices and big discounts. I’ve seen some studies that have shown that consumers respond much more favorably to something like 40% off of $40 than to a price of $24 — which is mathematically the same exact price. And JCPenney seems to be a living laboratory on that same effect.

But before you invest in that kind of big discount strategy whole-heartedly, you’d better have a plan in place for not turning off new customers — both in the initial hurdles to “get into the program” of discounts, and in the price image you’re setting for first-time shoppers who don’t have access to those discounts. If the barriers are too high, new customers will never get in.