For all the discounts and special offers students tend to enjoy, the motives of those targeting students with their products and services don’t always come from a place of showing solidarity with the students’ cause and their somewhat anaemic budgets. Quite the contrary really — for many product sellers and service providers, students are perceived to be so loaded that every opportunity to milk them a bit out of their money is duly taken.
Look, offering reduced bus pass prices to students is something totally different in that that’s a gesture which can be said to be taking the financial complexities of student life into account. I mean you can’t get away from the fact that you need to get around, whether it’s to and from campus, taking a visit to the doctor, gym, your family or even just going out with friends. Reduced transport fees will definitely come in handy and keep what is probably an already anorexic budget just a little bit healthier.
Those student discounts offered by producers and service providers of essential products and services can be said to be genuine attempts at helping the students out a little bit, but beyond that it’s totally the opposite. There are those industries which see students as nothing more than easy targets for money — industry players who perceive students to be loaded.
Unless you’re lucky enough to be one of those students who come from a wealthy family that affords you everything you want for and beyond your academics, you’d argue in completely the other direction and confidently proclaim that students aren’t indeed loaded. Individually you may have a strong case for proclaiming not to be loaded, but the retail industries and others who see students and mister and missus Moneybags are perhaps justified in thinking so because they take an overall look at the student market. They look at the student market as a group as opposed to picking out each student individually, which is precisely why they can afford to extend discounts to students and in a sense give them a way in to some of the products and service they’d perhaps otherwise not be able to afford.
If a certain clothing retailer were to make their garments too expensive for instance, putting them right out of the reach of the market which dominates the region (the student market in the case of that retailer located in a college town), they’d be missing out on a whole lot of business. If on the other hand that same retailer decides to rather make their products cheaper, it becomes about volume over the profit mark-up of each individual item sold. So the aim is then to get more students to buy, no matter how small the profit margins are and since it’s about volume then these little profit margins here and there add up to considerable overall gains.
So for as long as students can be gathered to complete a money-generating action as a group instead of individually, they will continue to be perceived as being loaded — well that and the fact that they have a financial lifeline in most instances which is linked directly back to their parents.