At any price. Used in German almost exclusively as a warning. Er wollte es um jeden Preis — he wanted it at any price — describes someone who has lost their judgment, not someone who is determined.
The price is right
The German title of the television show known in English as The Price Is Right, in which contestants guess the retail price of consumer goods. The premise only works if prices are knowable — if there is a right answer to guess. The show is built on the assumption that every item has one correct price.
Greed is great
Greed is great — an advertising slogan run by the electronics chain Saturn from 2002, shortly after the discount laws were repealed. It became one of the most argued-about slogans in German advertising history, blamed in public debate for a coarsening of commercial culture. The company eventually dropped it.
A campaign celebrating the pursuit of low prices caused a national argument about what the country had become.
What costs nothing is worth nothing
What costs nothing is worth nothing. Said in German about free advice, free offers and heavy discounts. It reverses the usual direction of suspicion. The doubt attaches not to the expensive thing but to the cheap one.
Worth its price
Worth its price. The German word for something that is good value, and it is built from Preis and wert. Not cheap. Not a bargain. Worth what it costs, which is a different and higher claim.
Cheap, and once fair
The modern German word for cheap, and it is rarely a compliment. Billigware, cheap goods. Eine billige Ausrede, a cheap excuse. Billiglohn, low wages.
The word once meant fair and proportionate — it survives in that sense only in recht und billig. Somewhere along the way, the German word for equitable became the German word for inferior.
The price-performance ratio
The price-performance ratio. A standard German compound with no clean English equivalent — value for money is close and carries a different logic, because it asks what you got for what you paid rather than whether the two correspond. The German word treats price and performance as two quantities in a defined relationship. A good ratio can be expensive.
The list price
Der Listenpreis. German suppliers publish price lists, and the list price is the price. Deviating from it requires a reason that can be stated: quantity, contract term, a documented specification change. The list is not an opening position. It is the answer to the question.
The free gift ordinance
Die Zugabeverordnung. The companion law, from 1932, limited free gifts with a purchase. The example used at the time: to stop people buying a bicycle because it came with a kilo of coffee. Repealed on the same day as the Rabattgesetz, and for the same reason — the EU e-commerce directive made it untenable.
The discount law
Das Rabattgesetz. From 1 January 1934 until 25 July 2001, German law restricted the discounts a retailer could give a consumer. Section 2 capped the cash discount at 3 percent of the price.
Germany was the only country in the European Union with a general prohibition on discounts — the government’s own bill said so when proposing repeal. The stated purpose was to stop customers being tempted too strongly by the size of a reduction.
A seventy-year-old law existed on the premise that a price is a fact, and that moving it around is a trick played on the buyer.