I worked in retail for a long time, and you might be surprised at how many people just buy things without shopping around at all, and just pay whatever price a particular retailer is asking for at the time. The one difference with Virgin is, many Virgin customers are specifically with them because they are value conscious, so are more likely to shop around, or wait for deals. When you start having too many sales and price reductions, you run the risk of ticking off many of your long time customers. They will also lose sales of newly released phones at full price, because some people who would have bought the phone at full price when it's first released, will wait, since they know the phone's price will be reduced fairly quickly.