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Which Price is Right?
slashdotNum2Big2Register writes "An interesting article at fastcompany about how things are being priced nowadays. The only drawback that concerns me is how each item and price can be connected to an individual. Amazon was already found to be doing this with their prices."
how they determine who gets the lowest price, adjust your profile to match.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The idea of pricing products is to charge every consumer the maximum amount they're willing to pay. The trick is that it's usually very hard to have a purshasing system that allows such price variance. Airline pricing is one example - the closer you are to the date you wish to fly, the higher the price. (This is a vast oversimplification, but you get the idea). This is because business travelers, who need to fly at a moment's notice, are willig to pay much more than a recreational traveler, who's planning vacations 6 months in advance and shopping for the best deal. Businesses like Amazone are going to try and use every edge they can to increase their margins. From their point of view it's a great idea to use the technology they already have.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Damn, if that's not a reason to use Mozilla, I don't know what is.
"The only drawback that concerns me is how each item and price can be connected to an individual."
.. Anyway, its just an idea! ..
Should this come to pass on a widespread basis, it could be counteracted by some sort of open pricing network, similar to P2P.
Somehow the system knows what prices I can get for an item, and what prices anybody else logged in can get, and routes the purchase through that person...
Similar to pricewatch, but more community based rather than retailer based...
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
This is capitalism. They aren't permitted to collude with other businesses, manipulate the market, or discriminate. Other than that, they have the right to set prices anyway they see fit. They can use the information they glean from you to adjust prices. However, the consumer must keep in mind that they need to get as much information about the product and competing sources as well.
Not quite individual level, but we get many catalogs for previous occupants of our current office space. Dell, in particular, sends multiple catalogs here. What I found very interesting is that 2 Dell catalogs - indentical in products offered - often have different pricing based on the recipient. The even more interesting thing is that both recipients worked for the same company at the same time, but one was male and one was female, and they were being offered at different prices. The 'product code' was the same, but the 'catalog code' (or something like it) was different. I can not remember if the prices were higher for the male or the female - sorry...
creation science book
"We've learned that certain aspects of our site resonate with customers in different ways, and we are continually fine-tuning our site presentation to see how these variables affect customers' purchasing decisions"
Last I checked... If you want to determine if "site changes" cause increase in purchasing etc you leave the price of a product static. This way you can determine if the increase came from better navigation. The price would be your static variable.
I bet that most people who read this ( not those of slashdot but of the world at large ) would fall for this simple and elegant lie.
We're offering this post for $5.00. Shortly we will raise the price by 11.2%. Eventually you may read it for free, but only if you have the coupon.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? --Abraham Lincoln
Hey, is that a discrimination lawsuit I smell?
Amazon Exec 1: "This customer buys Precious Moments figurines."
Amazon Exec 2: "They must be some middle-aged soccer mom. Charge them double for new releases, and half price for Disney."
Amazon Exec 1: "What about customers who buy How to Make a Million Dollars a Second?
Amazon Exec 2: "Charge double for everything. They'll be able to afford it eventually..."
There are a few forums I used to frequent, one for webmasters. It was mostly freelancers or one-man shops, from what I could tell, but the forum moderators were strict to the point of being stupid over 'pricing discussions'. "We can be sued for supporting price fixing" is the standard response.
One person asked what it was customary to charge for a certain type of service. I replied back that I've seen people charge anywhere from $50 to $1500. *THAT* was considered 'potential price fixing'. How a number with a variation of hundreds of percents could be 'fixed' is well beyond my comprehension.
You'd think then that magazines or websites which have pricing on them (like, for example, ecommerce sites) would be collaborating in price fixing, as they can see info from other companies, and those companies can see their info, and adjust things accordingly.
There's a difference between knowing what someone else charges and actively engaging numerous people to all sell at a particular price, but people don't seem to see the difference.
creation science book
And thanks to me, they get a killer deal on shipping due to a little known program known as consignment shipping via UPS so they pay less than half of what they normally would pay; though they charge you for the full price of shipping, nearly all of this money goes straight into their pocket. They now claim it is for the manpower to ship your book but I have an Uncle that works for the warehouse down in Nevada and gets paid minimum and the time it takes to fill an order is less than 3 minutes ($10/hr x 3 seconds = approx 0.75).
Now, they then charge full price and have items that they overstocked pull up higher in searches with edited customer reviews to make them appear better than they are. True fact. They started editing reviews back when I was there.
Oh the horror stories I could tell...
"...people just like the feel of a dead tree in their hands." -Jeff Bezos
Then on top of that
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
From the article: The spokeswoman for a telecom company said, "We're not going to talk about prices, and the fact that we're not going to talk about it is off the record. You can't use the fact that we won't talk about prices in a story."
So he goes and prints it anyways? Can he do that?
I used to work at a music store, you know, one of those places that sells one damned cd for $16-$18. Anyways, I was reading online at VH1, after some searching, I found the article. What makes me sad is that people went and supported the stores involved anyways. Not sure how to make this a link, but here's the URL for that story: http://www.vh1.com/news/articles/1457874/10012002/ id_0.jhtml
With sites like pricewatch.com, pricescan.com, and other competitive shopping sites I know what the market price is for any goods I buy online (generally big ticket electronics items, though I have used similar methods to check large appliances), so how does anyone ever pay much more than the market price for an item that isn't unique to a single online vendor? Do people really make impulse buys online?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Perfect price discrimination isn't new. It's just very, very hard to do. With today's technology and consumers, it's a lot easier to guess at the price that each customer will accept. For more on PPD, check any low level econ text. or book on economic game theory. Or check out some Mises for those economically inclined poor souls who believe in the price of a good equals the amount of labor involved.
I've known this for a while now. I have a small network at home, a number of Windows workstation, a few Linux workstations and a number of OpenBSD servers. What I do is look for an item on Amazon I want to buy, then go to that item on every available browser on every computer at home. Through Netscape, Mozilla, IE, Konqueror, Opera, Phoenix and Galeon. Then I complete the purchase from the cheapest one.
It's worked very well for me. Some browsers were as much as 30 dollars more than others for larger priced items. That to me would seem like a grey area in the legal system. You aren't allowed to charge varying prices at regular stores based on the customers appearance. You'd see Walmart getting sued left and right if at the registers they charged 15% more because I was wearing a suit and tie as opposed to looking like white trash. Or charging more for black comedy DVD's if you are black, the ACLU would be all over them in a heartbeat.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
There are a lot of posts worrying about business collusion, but what about customer collusion? A site like PriceWatch should be able to go through a website and collect prices under different profiles.
Then, as a customer, I might get a little annoyed knowing that a company is trying to sell me a book for $20 when I know Person X can get it for $15.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Financial services to the poor have, all else equal, much higher default risk. And default costs swamp everything else. Consider that the margin over cost of funds for most consumer credit is 2-3%. A default rate of 1% destroys the profitability.
And the proof of this is in the market. Credit companies are neither bashful nor shy. If there was money to make, your friends and Cap One and First USA would divert some of 1 billion or so peices of mail then send. Alliance capital tried and went bankrupt. Cap One tried, but was punished in the stock market for the risk.
The other minor effect is transaction costs. There is a smaller denominator to spread costs across. 1% of an $800 paycheck is different than 1% of a $200,000 mutual fund purchase.
This reminds of the myth about women being paid around 70% of what men are. If true, there must be someone out there hiring only women and killing their competitors with wildly lower labor costs. Ought to be easy, women are around 40% of the labor pool.
Oops. Doesn't seem to be happening. I know I'm willing to try it.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
That way, you never have to worry about prices.
But seriously, objective pricing probably is gone. Why? Well, we've transitioned to a service-based economy, and it's difficult to stick a price label on an intangible product (intellectual property, anyone?).
What makes a copy of XP Pro worth $299? Nothing. The box and the disks themselves are probably only worth a few bucks. And people know that MS runs 85% margins on these things, but still continues to buy them. And when so much of the economy is based on sales of intangibles....
Same goes for getting work done on your car. How much money does a head gasket cost? Well, the gasket, itself, is under fifty dollars. How much does a head gasket job cost? That's a different question entirely, now isn't it?
I can go anywhere I want to buy anything amazon has to offer me. The internet allows me to shop around with minimal effort. "Memory sticks are $52 at amazon? Well I saw them at compusa for $42"
I'm not worried about this because I don't shop and expect to get the lowest price unless I do some work. That amount of work has lessend with pricewatch and other deal sites, and this is where I think technology is hurting companies. Its too bad that neither article mentioned this, I would like to see how they plan on combatting it. Remember when "price matching" was all the rage?
I mean, amazon.com's prices are usually very flexible, they flood the market with coupon codes, free shipping, and so what if they charge more to an idiot who is willing to pay it. If they notice you're only buying the things that you see as being cheapest from them they'll realize whats up or their software isn't worth jack.
"Collectively the airlines change prices 75,000 times a day". All airline customers have been trained to shop around because of this. There is no company or brand loyalty because the customer knows if they dont shop for price they WILL get screwed. Instead of focusing every cent on how to undercut every other supplier, try providing the customers with quality service at affordable and consistently affordable rates. Customers do not want to be in the price shopping business. That is a lot of work. They want a ticket at a reasonable price. If one airline gave consistently affordable rates and decent service, customers would come back to that airline with confidence instead of changing airlines everytime because of a price blip. That is not possible with the current environment where the same airline will charge you $1000 more depending on some whim from a competitor. And this is touted as science?
I charge my customers depending on the size of the client. Huge medical conglomerates pay more (per hour and per project) than my next door neighbor or my favorite local band.
International businesses charge Americans more than they charge someone who makes $2 a week.
students get discounts on almost everything
ladies get in free on Thursdays.
etc, etc, etc...
The truth doesn't care what I think.
It's called "discriminatory pricing", and is not at all illegal or unethical. Look at your local movie theater. Say they charge $2 for kids and $7 for adults. Why? Because they'd have a family of four pay $18 dollars, rather than that family not go at all because it's $28. 1 x $18 > 0 x $28
Same thing with cheap night. Tuesdays, all seats are $2, because they'd rather have some people at $2/seat, rather than no people at $7/seat.
What really baffles me is that people think they're entitled to know what goes on behind the scenes when businesses set prices, or base buying decisions on that. "They're charging $7 for shipping when it only costs then a dollar!" So what? Is the total value of getting the items to your house worth it, or isn't it?
And no, it wasn't a pr0n site.
11/30/1998:
So the same computer that will
transmit you a reminder to buy
hamburger buns when you pick
up the patties will raise prices
for you as you approach the
lettuce. If your desire for a
lettuce purchase lags, you'll be
stimulated by additional
promotions designed to whet your
appetite. The supermarket will
be alive, and the deities that
govern it will operate in real
time.
From the article:
"Computerworld also checked the price of the Men in Black DVD today and discovered that on Netscape the quoted price was $25.97, while it cost $23.97 on Internet Explorer. After completely clearing the cache and cookie files of the PC being used, the price remained $25.97 using the Netscape browser but had risen to $27.97 with Internet Explorer. Oddly enough, people using Lynx were simply given items gratis."
My
Limekiller
I found this article about Wal*Mart to be an interesting read. It offers insight into the pricing game from the "other end".
-- derby
If the browser identifies as Safari, boost prices on anything hip or cool by 20% due to Apple-user lust for fashion and style.
If the browser is Lynx, lower prices by 20%, they can't even afford a free-as-in-beer graphical browser!
If the browser is Internet Exploder, blue screen thier PC and charge them a subscription just to access our web site.
Yum, the future of price discrimination!
Actually, this reminds me of a demographics company called Claritas that sells demographics assignment services based on where you live. (Try it for yourself here.)
So now in the future can we expect people to get assigned based on their browsers and OS identification?
Users who run Mozilla on Linux tend to have:
Three or more pets, play video games on a hidden Windows partition they don't talk about and consume Doritos by the truckload.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
Personally, I've paid $3+ for a bottle of water before, usually b/c I'm really thirsty and that's the only option. Now, if I'm dieing due to dehydration, it's certainly immoral to charge more than a fair/ standard price. Otherwise, let me make the decision.
Last note on bottled drink prices. They are expensive at sporting events, airports and rock concerts. Why? Scarcity of supply, which drives up prices, increases profits, which either go to maintain the airport and line the owner's pockets;. Note that the vendor doesn't relly make a killing. The rent (and other fixed costs) that he pays reflect the fact that he can maintain very high profit margins. I have no problem with that.
However, it makes my blood boil when I go to an event or place that charges $4+ for any sort of drink, and does not have drinking fountains available. I think it's a matter of time before some public parks decide to remove their water fountains (at some indeterminable savings), and gives the monopoly soft-drink contract to Coke or Pepsi, who then proceed to charge $1 for every drink in a public place. The park rangers/ city councilors will claim it's a win-win-win b/c 1) The city "saves" money by removing the water fountains, 2) the city is paid for giving the monopoly contract, 3) the consumers have a wider variety of drink choice! HAH!
I'd actually be fine with the scenario if there were no monopoly contract, b/c then the pricing would likely be reasonable. Ever notice how cheap Coke is in a Coke machine when it's next to a Pepsi machine? That's why the vendor wants the monopoly contract, and why public entities should NEVER give a true monopoly soft-drink contract (i.e, monopoly contract and water fountain removal).
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What else? Well, what about Microsoft? Its margins are--can this be right?--44%, and it's sitting on $38 billion in cash. Mr. Sam would not approve. Log on to walmart.com and you'll find $199 computers powered by a fledgling Windows competitor, Lindows.
That's the Wal-Mart position. Either Microsoft is going to have to cut their prices, margins, and profits, or Wal-Mart is going to undersell them with Lindows. It's going to be an interesting battle. The outcome may be a special low-end version of Windows for Wal-Mart.This is important for open source. Wal-Mart likes generic products and price competition. No one supplier gets 100% of a product category at Wal-Mart. Start thinking "Linux for Joe Sixpack".
...a random number generator.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Having multiple prices doesn't make accounting difficult. There is no simple answer why airlines go bankrupt, but part of the reason surely is that (i) they have huge fixed costs and long-term labor and facilities contracts, and at the same time (ii) they are in an extremely cyclical business, in the sense that during a recession where fuel prices rise, their customer demand falls.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Law/lawreview/vol536/boy le.pdf
James Boyle is, apart from being a very smart economist, one of the Good Guys in the copyright debate. His paper explains why price discrimination happens and some of the effects it produces.
This is rehash of an old, flawed argument:
1) Assume that the labor market is perfectly competitive.
2) Assume that competitive markets will eliminate wage disparities between equally qualified men and women.
3) Observe that wage disparity exists between men and women.
4) Conclude that "unobserved differences" between men and women explain the wage disparity.
What justification is there for assumptions 1 & 2?
One point of the article is that businesses can make themselves better off by segmenting the market and selling products to different people for different prices. If businesses can do this when it comes to selling products, why can't they do the same for buy products, like say, labor?
The argument that markets will eliminate wage differentials based on gender or race assumes perfectly competitive markets composed of identical goods with many anonymous buyers and many anonymous sellers with full information available about the quality of the products and all prices. Every single one of these conditions is absent in the labor market.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
The point the article was making is that they select people at random within a demographic, and give them *different* prices. They call this scientific pricing because they maintain other people as the 'control', then gauge how you, the experimental group react to the new prices.
Since the selection is random I don't see an obvious way to exploit it, with the possible exception of re-loading to see if the price changes. Presumably Amazon has some system for preventing that (like requiring you to log in).
One of the interesting conclusions from many of the retailers interviewed in the article was that discounts should be smaller, but sooner. That sounds good to me, since in general I'm too lazy and impatient to wait around for the 'big sale', and end up paying higher prices. Maybe that same sentiment is why it works?
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
It's very standard practice.
I travel quite a bit as part of my job. No less than 3 weeks every 2 months on the road, usually more. These trips are usually for a business week at a time, and require me to fly on MY time, i.e. Sundays, and sometimes Friday night red-eyes back from the left coast.
The miles are some of the things that make the job worthwhile. I could make just as much money, sitting on my ass writing code. The miles somewhat make up for the fact that I'm away from home for extended periods at a time. Too often people who never travel for work, or maybe take one business trip every two years, look at it as glamerous. It's not. It's work, only, unlike you, I dont get to go home at night. I drive my rental car back to my hotel, eat in the lobby and watch a movie on my notebook.
If I wasn't at least getting the miles for my trips (which pay for my vacations), I wouldn't be travelling.
Simple enough.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This has no impact on the arguement at a Micro-Economic level.
Hypothetically, imagine that you are a clever entrepreneur, and start your own restaurant. The restaurant is doing well, so you decide to hire a IT person. You advertise on Monster and get 50 resumes. (In this economy you get 500 resumes). You winnow the list to the 10 qualified applicants, and then discover that 4 of them want 30% less money. Which do you hire?
This decision certainly does not depend on anonymity, identical applicants, or PERFECT competition. It just depends on smart people doing a good job of hiring.
I don't believe that we have a gender gap in productivity or ability. I believe we have a statistics gap.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
FFMs encourage additional trips (airline revenue) by providing a nudge toward flying when the need might be on-the-fence or justifying "impulse" flying. This has an immense benefit for airlines, of course. The benefit to the company is that employees don't revolt against necessary travel. I can tell you from personal experience that flying day-in and day-out (in my case daily, up-and-down the US west coast for several years) loses its romance very quickly and becomes little more exciting that a daily car commute. At some point I might have tried to find excuses for skipping a trip if I wasn't getting FFM (I wasn't on commision). If it helps think of FFM as like a fee paid by airlines and company to the employee for enduring the hardship of frequent flying.
There are other benefits: for example, allowing a spouse or SO to come-along on a business trip because of FFM is a major productivity and morale boon that benefits the company. Even from an accounting perspective, the business trip cost for the employee are a sunk cost and the spouse's cost is largely covered by FFM thus it is largely cost neutral to the company. If the trip is for vacation, vacation time is already a sunk cost for the company, and in fact, the vacation time is on the company books as an unrealized accrued expense which has negative tax implications until it can be realized. There is a benefit to the company to having the employee take the time off, and if FFM are the lubricant that does that, so much the better.
As a side note: I've been wondering how much economic impact does the added airport security have due to preventing marginal or impulse flying? I haven't run the numbers but it would not surprise me if 20-30% of the current economic downturn could be explained by it. I used to routinely hop on a plane with only hours notice and zip up to Seattle or down to San Diego. A certain percentage of the time (1:4 or 1:5) a deal in 6-7 figures would close as result. That kind travel is completely impossible now.
In general, most of the security added is probably marginal in terms of effectiveness but certainly "throughput" of most processes that depend on travel are significantly slowed. Most of the economic growth of the last two decades is due to productivity improvements related to JIT manufacturing (which has been seriously crippled by travel security) and due to increases in "turns" (sales, inventory, etc.) of all types (which are reduced by slowing things down).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Not every company allows employees to keep miles as a perk. The miles are applied to future business travel. And, I believe, in the U.S., federal employees and military members are not allowed to use miles for personal travel. When employees do enough flying -- certainly the case with the feds and the military -- it is worth the time and effort to track the miles earned by employees.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Amazon has a decent browsing systems in place, but once I find something I want I use a cheap book search engine or go elsewhere to find cheap computer components or use another engine to fine cheap stuff. In the end I pay less for the product + SH than any browser purchaseing directly from amazon.
Amazon does charge different people different prices, dumb people who shop there end up paying a lot more money.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Alan is willing to write a report about something, say electronic money, if he can make $1500 on it.
Betty is willing to pay $1000 for the report.
Charlie is willing to pay $700 for the report.
If Alan were to charge $700, both people would buy the report, but he wouldn't make his $1500 so he wouldn't produce it.
How about instead, he charges:
Betty $950
Charlie $650
Now both customers get a price break from what they were willing to pay, and Alan gets an additional $100. And something of value was created that otherwise might not have been. So is this a good thing?
The issue here is about moving forward. Was there a problem with access to finance in 1969? Absolutely. And it was an embarassment 33 years ago.
In practice, our economy has come a long way. I think it is no longer clear that financial services for the poor are more exploitive than financial services to the rich.
Reason (admittedly a bunch of libertarians) argues that there is a legitimate need for this type of service.
I believe that if there is a market, greedy people will rush in.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Some of this (all of it?) is borrowed from optimal foraging studies in nature; companies forage for customers, and want the most/best customers with the least effort and risk. Any animal that forages with something more than blind luck employs some kind of an optimization strategy. While is it true that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, it is not always true that the grass is of such superior quality as to justify the trouble/expense/risk of getting through the fence. Same applies to stalking predators.
We are not called "consumers" for nothing. We devour things, use them up. But we expend effort in doing so, and wish to minimize that at every turn. We've all been there; you want cheaper gas, but are you willing to sit in line, idling your engine and getting no where, to get it? Someone obviously is willing to do that because otherwise there would not be a line, but their situation (maybe they have no money and are not in a hurry) is different from your own (you got places to be.)
How do animals do this? It is the subject of a lot of study since some of the strategies would appear to require a good deal of instinct in the guise of intelligence. And the strategies can become so critical and sensitive to minor changes in input that the strategies can finally drive speciation itself. How you forage can actually shape who you are and what you look like, and even drive you into so tight a corner that you are vulnerable to extinction (take pandas for example.)
What was interesting about this article was that the author came to much the same conclusion; pricing will drive what companies do and even how they function. Eventually, pricing strategies may create new companies that can exploit/forage across new resources or simply exploit old resources more completely. That is certainly a form of commercial speciation, with all the attendant risks and opportunities.
Commerce used to be a generalized affair, a product of human imagination and under our (inexact) control. What happens when commerce becomes like an organism in its own right, with its own strategies for survival, where we are but the engine that drives it? And for that matter, do we then become the food source for commerce in turn?
Trout eat their own offspring, which seems counter-Darwinian. The study of why they do that is fascinating and terrifying at the same time; they eat their young because the young can get at food resources under stones and in the reeds that the adults cannot. When the adult eats the fingerlings, they are efficiently foraging for grubs under stones that normally they would never reach. The young are like an extended feeding organ of the adults, and the advantage of eating them is just enough to outweigh the loss of life.
Perhaps commerce, the child of our own genius, is looking at us hungrily. We work creatively to buy things and our work nourishes what used to be our child but is now our master. Unknown to us, we are in the end serving and not being served. Unless in "being served" one means served up with fries and a regular drink.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
The neat curves and crisp laws of supply and demand, elasticity, and rational behavior that everyone learns in microeconomics class don't work in the real world.
That's macroeconomics and it does indeed work. That's the whole problem with this aproach. To paraphrase Alan Greenspan, "laws of supply and demand are not to be conned."
Business is at the start of a new era of pricing. This era is being shaped by a new set of insights into business strategy and human behavior, and these insights are turbocharged with software, mathematics, and rapid experimentation. The result is what might be called "scientific pricing." There is even a blossoming industry of a dozen companies that offer scientific-pricing services.
I'll bet there are a whole pile of companies willing to charge you to piss off your customers like that. "Turbocharged" indeed, that means twisted, right? Anyone who believes charging two people different prices for the same thing will make them happy, has a serious lack of insight into human behavior. People talk and feel ripped off.
Changes in pricing will alter every part of the economy. The way that business gets done will change, and companies will flourish or be crushed based in part on their ability to grasp and master the new science of pricing. Among those already using the new techniques are Best Buy, DHL, Ford Motor Co., the Home Depot, JC Penney, Safeway, Saks, Staples, UPS, and Winn-Dixie. General Electric, perhaps taking Jack Welch's warnings to heart, is not only working with at least two different pricing companies -- it has also invested in one.
Send that list to fucked company. All are known for overpricing shoddy merchanise. Soon they will be known for anti-trust violations, save GE which still makes good industial wares and might be smart enough to avoid this new scheme to bilk companies. Winn-Dixie with it's silly little black punishment card is wasting money that could better be spent elsewhere, while my wife now buys groceries at WalMart.
The oldest records of prices ever found are clay tablets with pictographic symbols found in a town known as Uruk, in what was ancient Sumer and what is now southern Iraq. These price records are from 3300 BC -- they've survived 5,300 years. The documents -- records of payment for barley and wheat, for sheep, and for beer -- are really receipts. "Uruk was a large city, at a minimum 40,000 people," says UCLA professor Robert Englund, one of the few experts on the Uruk documents. "So some of the quantities are very high -- hundreds of thousands of pounds of barley, for instance."
OK so far.
But here's the really remarkable thing. The earliest Uruk tablets aren't just the oldest pricing records ever found. They are the oldest examples of human writing yet discovered. In other words, when humans first took stylus to wet clay, the first thing that they were compelled to record was . . . prices.
Bzzzzt - they recorded your generosity to the temple and other administrative stuff. What they show is a deeply rooted human desire for equal treatment and fairness. This is exactly the oposite of using electronic records in a vain atempt to foist higher prices on, "suckers".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That is the opposite of price gouging. The were so aggressively low fee/price that they were nearly bankrupted by a minor economic downturn.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
There is no company or brand loyalty because the customer knows if they dont shop for price they WILL get screwed.
:-) . Fact is, it's very hard to sell expensive first class seats to latin america, in comparison to europe, so the airlines can only try to make a profit on economy class. Which is exactly what they do with fares that seem abnormally high for the distance traveled. (I should add that fares to latin america are some of the most stable...they barely move up or down, and we've paid the same price, within $100, 90% of the time we've gone there, for the last 20 years. Clearly it's getting slightly cheaper with time, but it's pretty stable.)
For the most part, airline service is not differentiable...though there does seem to be an observable difference between the low quality carriers and the high quality carriers on service and on-time performance. But that isn't known to your leisure travellers, who shop entirely by price, unless they have had some abnormally negative experience on carrier X. I need not tell you that everyone and their grandmother tries to book a trip somewhere, the first thing they ask about is price.
Having said that, leisure travellers simply aren't profitable, or you need a hell of a lot of them before the flight at least breaks even. Your supersaver 21 day advance fares are a loss to the airline. (Incidentally, the consistency in airline fares come from the fact that everyone knows that fares go up the closer you are to the travel date. On a side note, the expansion of the complexity of supersaver fares is how checking for photo ID was introduced--it never had anything to do with security, it had to do with making sure that person X wasn't buying a ticket in advance that they had no intention to use, to sell to person Y who suddenly needed to go somewhere and didn't wanna pay full price.)
Anyways interesting example of this (regrettably, the only example in my head) is the Continental 757 flight from Cleveland to London Gatwick. It's not an exception at all incidentally...but if you fill all the first class seats on this flight, you'll pay for the entire plan to London *and* back. On the other hand, you need a good 100 passengers in economy class to get same result. Therefore first class is vitally important...and airlines spend huge amounts of money trying to differentiate their first class products. And who flies first class? Business travelers who care about being on-time and the service/amenities they get. Simply, airlines can barely care about their economy class product since they lose money/only break even on the majority of seats anyway.
I'm from Costa Rica, and my mother often flies down there to see the family. One thing that always bugged her was the fact that fares to latin america were terribly high in comparison to fares to europe, and it seems that flying to europe is a much more complex transaction, not to mention it's farther
So having said that, it only makes sense that airlines try to change prices many times per day to eek out just a little bit of profit on the economy class seats. It's the only thing they can do.
I incidentally disagree with your comment that Customers do not want to be in the price shopping business. Customers love to price shop...especially when they are buying their ticket 3 months in advance. There is such a psychological reward in getting a good deal.
My fifth semester towards a bachelors degree in software engineering I had to choose between paying rent and paying tuition.
I went homeless for several months, showered in friend's bathrooms when I got a chance and washed my clothes (both pair) in the dorm laundromat. I studied in the dining area of fast food resturants because they had the lights on 24x7, a particularly harsh reminder that I was hungry and didn't have enough money to splurge on fast food. I was working, had a job at the local grocery store as a cashier but that money went towards tuition, books, and food with nothing left over for rent.
That was over a decade ago and I have never regretted it. I look at today's homeless begging on streetcorners and I cry my single tear in memory of that semester, then I drive on.
Everybody has a choice. If I did it, no help from anybody, no handouts, no contacts, a minimum wage job, and no welfare (I was too proud to ask, and thought I was above it. Dumb, probably, but everybody has their pride inspired dumb allowance) then anybody can do it.
You (meaning the metaphysical you, not bagging on you in particular) can do it. I know because I did it. It isn't a question of can you do it, it is a question of are you willing.
Willing to pay that 782% interest on a paycheck loan to get you through the week.
Willing to give up television, cable, all of your worldly belongings and possessions to make it happen.
Basically, willing to pay the price today in order to succeed tomorrow. Those of us that did have no sympathy for those who didn't and won't.
It doesn't take a 4 year degree, but a 4 year degree certainly helps. A BS degree doesn't come cheap however, in what you will need to sacrifice to get it in terms of dollars and hours.
To summarize, I have been poor (homeless for 3-4 months qualifies) and I have been rich. Rich is better.
I was a man with no contacts, no power, and no wardrobe. Nobody GAVE anybody a crippling overdraft and credit card bills, those were a choice (and yes, rent is a choice, as is medical attention, warm food and pretty clothes and a vehicle are all choices...) and I lived on $3.35 an hour, 30 hours a week (that's $400 a month.) Granted that was a while back, but that's real life.
I used my skills constructively and guess what, became a self made man. Maybe I am the exception to the rule, but I sure hope not.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer