There’s a reason the newsletter you’re reading is called Retail Paradox. When we started RSR (on June 15 it will be eight years! Time flies!), we observed three essential paradoxes retailers were grappling with: the shift to global supply while trying to satisfy far more local demand, the imperative to improve customer service while also cutting costs, and finally a desire to focus on customers while pleasing shareholders. We’ve based much of our research on learning how you, the retailer, satisfy these seemingly mutually exclusive imperatives. We knew there’d be more, but that was more than enough to attend to at the time.

Fast forward to April 2014. While we’ve noted and discussed other paradoxes along the way, we’ve gone ahead and found a new one. We’ve recently released our seventh annual Pricing benchmark report, (you can download it here) and lo and behold, we’ve stumbled upon the Pricing Paradox. Here’s how it plays out:

Retailers acknowledge, across this and several other benchmarks, the need to create a consistent customer experience across channels. Retail Winners in particular are fixated on this notion. Simple enough, right? So simple that it’s almost a truism like “Motherhood and apple pie ” by this time.

Yet we also see a trend, particularly among those same Retail Winners, to focus on channel specific promotions. That means the price I see in the store as a consumer OR employee might be very different from the price I see on-line. Three times as many Retail Winners than laggards are executing on these channel-specific promotions.

Of course, savvy retailers will insure that they don’t have stock of that product on the channel it’s not on promotion in. But what does that do to “endless aisle ” applications? How do we manage those prices? If the rule becomes “low price wins ” who are we kidding? And what will the consumer backlash be?

So while we’ve made note of it, and acknowledged it both as a Paradox and as a seemingly “Winning ” behavior, we’ve had to go on record as saying it’s not a sustainable practice.

Just as retailers had to acknowledge that the need for speed had succumbed to the need for low-cost supply, and dealt with it, and they’ve had to acknowledge that you can’t keep taking payroll out of the store while expecting to satisfy customers, they’re going to eventually have to acknowledge some fundamental human behaviors. The price has to be the price. We can kinda sorta justify loyalty -based pricing, especially if it’s based on real loyalty, rather than just “I’ve got the card ” based loyalty. But channel specific? Only for close-outs, I think. I just don’t see channel-specific promotions as having legs.

So write to me… tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me how this paradox is going to work without pain? I honestly want to know.