PIFCO; 011

Provincial Incandescent Fittings Company may not be a name that is immediately identifiable to most people, and even with my marginally "techy" background I couldn't place it... but putting on my Alan Turing hat, just looking at the initial letters gives you "PIFC", which I then realised was actually "PIFCO" which I have heard of.

PICFO 1

PIFCO are for me, a budget-priced electronics and electricals manufacturer. The best way to demonstrate that is to use what is commonly known as the "Argos Principle" (well, for me anyway).

I came up with this theorem a long time ago, as a customer of Argos, when I had an Epiphany when looking through the company's catalogue. For those of you that aren't familiar with Argos and can't be bothered to click the link, they are one of the last (or THE last?) catalogue-based shopping retailers I'm aware of in the UK; you walk into their High Street stores, and rather than having everything on sale out and visible, you instead have "stands" or kiosks which house a huge, thick, laminated each page catalogue, along with pens / pencils and order "forms". The idea is that you use the catalogue to find what you want to order, fill in the catalogue number on an order slip, and either take it to the till and pay, or take it to a self-service kiosk and pay by card in the same way. You then get an order number and proceed to the "collection point", and your goods are picked and conveyed to the collection point from the stock area. The idea here is that the tiny "show room" aka catalogue space allows for much more of the store space to be used for warehousing of the stock. 

IKEA springs to mind as another company that does this sort of "fill out an order form and collect it as you leave", but the difference to Argos is that IKEA still has all the items out on display for you to view physically, where as Argos doesn't; you are literally "trusting" the catalogue pictures and text.

Anyway, without going off at a tangent too much, the thing I always find with Argos was that if you shop for any given item, they will have a range of goods covering a range of prices. Let's take a simple filter coffee maker... they will have the cheapest (probably their own "Cookworks"-brand one) for something like £7, right up to a top-of-the-range "Heston Blumenthal" filter coffee maker, for £199.99, and everything in between. 

What I always find myself doing is despite having no money these days, I always subconsciously discount the cheapest item and usually the next two or three "up"... or in other words if there are 10 coffee makers, I'll discount 10, 9, and probably number 8, along with the most expensive 1, 2 and possibly 3, leaving me with a choice of just 4. 

What I didn't realise was that I'm not alone in doing this, and Argos knows it too; although I can't find anything online right now, I remember reading that we all look at lists like this and think "Oh, I don't want the cheapest one... that'll be junk... and I don't want to pay for the most expensive one, as that will just be over-the-top "name brand" no better than something cheaper.... No, I'll get whatever I can afford from the remaining middle 'chunk'."

Argos know this is how people tend to shop from "lists", be it online, in a catalogue or whatever, where groups of similar products are involved. They ensure that in each store they will always have more of the "middle band" goods, and only a limited number of the cheapest and the most expensive items. The same likely goes for their UK supply / buying strategy; don't buy 100,000 of each coffee maker; buy numbers based on where they sit in the price hierarchy; 10,000 of the expensive one, 10,000 of the cheapest one, and 100,000 of the mid-range ones.

Do you find you tend to use this approach, even if you've never considered it before?

PIFCO 2

Where was I? Oh yes, so PIFCO to me is a somewhat "lower" brand-name, along the lines of "Binatone" (another often cheapest option for any electricals in the Argos catalogue), rather than up there with the giants of name-brands like "Apple", "Sony" et al.

What I didn't realise was that the company has been in existence for over 100 years, originally established in Manchester in 1900, Provincial Incandescent Fittings Co or PIFCO as they are now better known, sold a wide range of lighting, stoves & household goods from the first oil filled heaters, to developments in lighting and domestic appliances.

Battery-wise, I don't recall seeing these for sale in any of the stores I visit, and have only encountered them already fitted as OEM batteries in some products (and not PIFCO ones, I mean... I think I bought a garden ultrasonic cat scarer once that came with batteries and they were PIFCO ones, and that was years ago) but I did find you can still buy them here, for example, although PIFCO as a brand was no longer being used by the actual owners, Russell Hobbs for some time, but was then licensed for use by one KB (Import and Export) Ltd in 2007 who went on to market a range of electrical items under the name.

Bit leaky this one, but it does look to be at least 7 years old as of 2019.