The Loss Leader

What this pack runs.

A loss leader is discussed as a price and behaves as a loan. You lend the difference between what the cheap thing costs you and what you charge for it, at the point of sale, to every customer who walks out with one — including every customer who will never buy anything else. It is repaid out of a second sale that has not happened yet, and the revenue figure in the paper is almost always measured on the customers who came back and then credited to every unit sold. Two numbers, both true, with different denominators. This pack sizes the loan, counts the repayment, and returns the share of units that must come back for it to clear — beside the share that does. Below that line the program loses money on every unit it sells, which means volume makes it worse rather than better. It stops on two conditions: nobody has counted what the cheap thing costs all in, and nobody has counted the units that never came back.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.