trig42: IMO, Noels did not intend to sell it for that price, they were just caught out with their Queen's Birthday promotion as it had not excluded the phone.
Good on them for carrying through.
NL told me that they had not intended the SGS3 to be included in the sale. The promotion was planned before they knew the launch date of the phone and because they hadn't specifically excluded SGS3's they had to offer the discount to anyone who asked for it. However, apparently the stores were not supposed to offer rain checks or pre-orders at the discounted price. The sale terms were only for stock that they held. According to them, some store offered rain checks which then caused other stores to match them when people asked for it. It all happened so fast and word spread so quickly that head office didn't get a chance to stop the rain checks/pre-orders.
Those talking about cost, don't forget the store's cost is made up of unit price + warehousing/distribution + store handling and overheads. Pre-orders add to the sales processing costs. One store told me that the promotion-matching price gave them less than 5% on the base unit cost, which isn't enough to cover their overheads. Unless someone knows what NL internal costs and overheads are then I don't think we can know if they sold below cost or not.
