Technical jargon: What does "sale" actually mean?

At the moment, this word is haunting you. For a few years now, however, the four letters have not only been seen as a sales booster for retailers at the beginning of each year or in the summer, but they have been emblazoned in the windows of stores and browsers almost all year round.

Sale is English and literally means sale, but in common parlance it means either off, closing, special, or whatever sale. On certain days, it is usually supplemented with words such as "Single Day" (from China) and "Black Friday" (from the U.S.) and soon "Ramadan" (from the Arab world).

This sale inflation is not healthy - neither for buyers nor for sellers. Who hasn't experienced this as a consumer: Suddenly you have a lot of the same thing just because it was cheaper, instead of a little of the right thing. Somehow understandable, because who wants to pay full price for something today when they can pay much less for the same product on certain days or weeks?

Sales are also unhealthy for sellers. Of course, sales can be increased in the short term, but this is not sustainable. The killer of such a permanent sale trend is that sales stagnate at best, if not collapse, as soon as no discounts are available (see above). And if the sellers don't do their margin calculations correctly, they suddenly end up with lower returns despite more sales. After all, the seductive four letters in Italian stand for something completely different: salt. In the kitchen, salt is both a flavor enhancer and a flavor killer. And every child knows that too much of it is unhealthy.