Loan "sales"

Yesterday I popped into a branch of Sainsbury's, something I usually avoid for a whole bunch of reasons, to get a couple of things I can't get elsewhere, such as my favourite brand of fags. As I was hanging about at the checkout trying to keep my patience in the middle-class feeding frenzy my eye was caught by a display right by the conveyor belt. This announced, in bright colours and big fonts, a "LOAN SALE!!" - hurry, hurry, hurry and get our unbeatable 6% (or whatever it was) while stocks last. This really made me do a double-take. How can you have a "sale" of services? The whole point of a "sale" is for the retailer to run down its stocks of particular goods to prepare for new product lines by making space in its warehouses and shops. Of course a sale has other purposes, such as being a loss-leader, getting publicity, generating cash flow, and whatnot, but the essence of goods being sold is that they have physical presence and take up space.

So how on earth can you have a 'sale' of things that don't exist? Things that aren't things, but services? The only service that I can think of, off the top of my snout, that could conceivably have a sale is transport, where there might be a limited number of seats on a bus/train/ferry/plane/stagecoach and the operator is eager to fill space that would otherwise be empty, but still there is a physical presence involved - the seats. A loan has no physical representation. You don't churn out 00s of 000s of loans from a production line then have to flog off all the unsold ones to make way for another line of loans. A loans company can choose to make as many or as few loans as it wants at any time, and if punters aren't taking them up then they either stop making the loans or drop the interest rates. It's not as if they've produced 100,000 hamster balls and find themselves with 50,000 left on their hands clogging up shelf space.

This must come from the same Suit mentality that refers to services provided by insurance companies, banks, building societies, and other Finance Capital institutions, as "products". If you listen to that petit-bourgeois anal-retentive greedfest that is Radio Four's Moneybox programme you can't avoid some Suit or other talking straight-faced about "financial services products" when what they mean is insurance policies, or bank loans, or mortgages. Marketing Suits might define "product" as anything that can be sold [1], but to Joe and Jane Punter a product is something that is produced, a physical entity, not a service.

[1] See the Wikipedia definition of "product (business)", which has plainly been written by someone in Marketing.