Artifact

Because my post this week involved framing, I wanted to look at the ways frames affect price in a less traditional sense than framed paintings. The above image is a photo of Fannie May candy in a special holiday box. As I've written about before, I work at Fannie May and am therefore very familiar with price and how prices change depending on something as simple as a box.

Candy is traditionally packed in simple white boxes at $22.99/lb. However, if a customer decides they want their candy "framed" by a decorative box such as the one in the photo above, the price of the box jumps from $22.99 to $24.99. Interestingly, we do not charge extra if we wrap boxes for customers, which frames the candy differently than a simple white box. There are probably reasons associated with payroll and labor hours for why decorative boxes are more expensive--but it is additional labor for associates to wrap boxes as well, and the price does not change. During holidays, it can be an additional cost for gift wrapping elsewhere.

Another example of a price increase due to how a product is framed is with our chocolate roses. A chocolate rose is regularly $4.49, but a chocolate rose that is wrapped in cellophane and tied with a bow is $4.99. Again, this takes little to no effort and minimal amounts of material, yet we charge extra because it is a more attractive way to "frame" the product. Again, if we did not offer roses wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon and a customer happened to ask us to do that, we wouldn't even think twice about charging them, just like we don't charge extra to gift wrap for them. However, according to the corporate office, an attractive chocolate rose is worth 50 cents more than a plain one.

Again, as mentioned in the previous post, framing causes others (in this case, consumers) to interpellate and decode items differently. Something that is framed attractively is more costly than something that is not, and I've never had a customer question that fact--it is simply an accepted fact in our society.