Bait-and-switch

Bait-and-switch

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For the album by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, see Bait and Switch (album). For the book by Barbara Ehrenreich, see Bait and Switch (book).

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Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also employed in other contexts. First, customers are "baited" by merchants' advertising products or services at a low price, but when customers visit the store, they discover that the advertised goods are not available, or the customers are pressured by salespeople to consider similar, but higher-priced items ("switching").

Bait-and-switch techniques have a long and widespread history as a part of commercial culture. Many variations on the bait-and-switch appear, for example, in China's earliest book of stories about fraud, Zhang Yingyu's The Book of Swindles (c. 1617).[1]