relak lah bruther

Imagine making one group of people pay almost twice as much as their fellow citizens!!

For goodness sake, installment prices include a component of interest. If you look at the example quoted by one of the commenters on the original post, the installment price is $3.13 a week for 48 months, or $600.96 by the end of the 4 years, while the pay-all-now price is $379.

If you work out the interest rate on the installment price, you'll find that it's about 12.2% per annum, which is not that unreasonable is it (credit cards charge you around 20%)?

Of course if you don't let people know that there's a pay-all-now price, then that's discriminatory, but then you're going to have to prove that when the salesman was asked, he refused to say it.

Since when has targeted advertisement become known as discrimination?

I looked at the two ads and saw no difference in pricing. What am I supposed to be looking for? It's true that the Malay ad features the instalment plan more heavily while the English one features the full price more heavily, but BOTH prices are printed there and are exactly the same.

How is this "making one group of people pay almost twice as much as their fellow citizens"? Much ado about nothing, I think.

It's insinuating that readers of BH prefer to pay everything in installments.

it's a marketing strategy and for a marketing strategy to exist, it has to be substantiated with data, research and so forth. advertising and marketing is after all about getting your products to your audiences in a manner most likely to attract prospect buyers.

but courts has failed to identify that such an execution may potentially be discriminative and personally i think they should have approached their advertisements with tact.

I wonder what Zaobao, Today, TNP and oter news papers say.

Maybe your MP cares...? Who knows...?

But maybe Courts later calls you threaten you legal action for touching on this topic...?

So beware hor~

By: Member of Public.

Where is the "blatant discrimination"? Both ads list 2 payment structures -- instalments, or lump sum. Both payment structures are exactly the same.

Ah is quite obvious targeting/'discrimination'. The comparison seems to imply that the readers of Berita Harian are more attracted to paying installments while the readers of Straits Times are more attracted to the lump sum. Indirectly, it can be taken (whether rightly or wrongly) to mean that readers of Berita Harian find the installment structure more sensible and/or affordable than the lump sum structure.

What they mean to say is that Chinese are richer and can pay everything down, whereas Malays have to pay by installments.

This is really dumb. Why don't you say that the other ethic groups are being discriminated against because their language papers don't feature as prominently installment offers, thereby reducing their chances of buying products by installment ?

This is a classic case of the poor editorial values at Tomorrow. There's not much else to be said. How blind do you have to be to not recognise what other posters have pointed out so easily?

Can we actually have editors who bother to read the article before it reaches publication?

OMG!!

English readers are being discriminated against for having to squint at an installment plan thats offered in slightly smaller font!!!!!

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING!!!

UNFOUNDED MORAL RAGE

RAAAR

Hahaha! raaarr!

Of course the original poster did not mention discrimination....

Singapore is paradise, there is no discrimination, all races live in harmony, businesses are fair to all employees unlike the US...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1994/07/hudson.html

Robbin' the Hood

News: How Wall Street takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

The signs tempt you with bright paint or neon: Bad Credit? No Credit? No Problem! . . . Checks Cashed . . . Debt Consolidation Loans . . . $8.95 a week and it's yours!

Poor, working-class, and minority neighborhoods across America have always teemed with grimy storefronts and swift-talking salesmen: pawnshops, check-cashing outlets, tin men, easy-credit loan companies, furniture and appliance stores that let you pay it off a week at a time.

But these days the storefronts are a bit spiffier. The front windows are squeegeed clean. The names have changed, and even they seem cleaner: Cash America, ACE America's Cash Express, Rent-A-Center, Associates Financial Services.

And the names behind the names have a familiar ring: NationsBank, Transamerica, Ford Motor Company, American Express. Thanks to the deregulation frenzy of the last decade, many of America's biggest and most powerful corporations now own or finance the fringe businesses that target low-income, working-class, and minority consumers.

Melvin Adams, a black truck driver from Augusta, Ga., borrowed $10,500 from Transamerica Financial Services after his house was gutted by fire. He says the company "kept rolling it over," lending him more money but also tacking on new costs, until his debt totaled $42,700. His interest rate: 17 percent.

Grassroots organizations are springing up to help hardworking people like Melvin Adams fight these higher prices. But the banks and other mainstream businesses that have locked the poor out of the market for competitively priced financial services--and forced them to go to lenders who charge exorbitant rates--are using their money and power to protect their profits.

Blatant discrimination? More like blatant brain damage of the person who submitted this article. Just because one payment plan is displayed more prominently than another in 2 different papers doesn't mean that there is "blatant discrimination". What an idiot!