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How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All (theatlantic.com)
Thelasko shares an excerpt from a report via The Atlantic, which describes how price discrimination is used in online shopping and how businesses like Amazon try to extract consumer surplus: Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer. We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. "It's most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price," Guru Hariharan explained, after I had sketched the pattern on a whiteboard. The right price -- the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets -- has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It's also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price -- and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)
"Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer."
You mean they want your money and will do anything to get it? Shocking, simply shocking.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Yeah, because brick and mortar stores have never had flash sales and temporary price reductions people would literally have to run across the store to take advantage of. And Home Shopping Network, QVC, etc, never reduced prices on things at different times of the day or when inventory didn't sell as expected.
Better known as 318230.
EZ Peasy
Because I hate to tell you, but stores in Beverly Hills charge more than they do in Compton for the exact same product.
And their are these things called "sales" and "coupons" to differentiate pricing even at the same store.
Yes, online makes it a bit more obvious, and yes, smart people can kill the cookies that are more likely to raise your price than reduce it (they assume no cookie = new customer, so they offer lower prices).
Study should be redone, comparing price differential online with those off-line.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"Mozilla/Linux"
He's a cheap SOB and will expect everything for free.
Have gnu, will travel.
...but that we buy "things" so often and feel we need them, instead of saving for the future so that we can have one when all these things will have been used up anyway
Twinstiq, game news
The actual article is much more nuanced than the headline. The most interesting thing that was found with large retailers and price discrimination was not that people saw different prices for the same thing (that apparently seldom happens - to easy for people to get upset about) but that, based on your consumer profile, the particular models of whatever you are looking for are different. If you are high income and searching for headphones, you will see different models (and different brands) than if the system has you as low-income. That is, the system will nudge you towards higher-margin items if they think you have the money; if not you will see lower cost variants. Of course the market segments that way now anyway - Ford vs Lexus vs Maybach. But there is a lot of effort going into gaming your snap decisions.
Why do you buy things you don't need, and who compels you to do this?
If I absolutely MUST have a new pair of shoes (e.g. airline lost my luggage, etc.) today, I go buy them today. If I can wait, then I may shop around a bit. I am also smart enough to factor in the cost of gas when deciding whether or not to drive to some specific place to shop.
What exactly are you saving for? If you die at 89 year old tomorrow with $10 million in the bank, what good was that $10 million to you?
The only thing I'll give you is saving up to buy versus buying on credit. If you can afford to spend the money to buy a thing that will enrich your life, then you should buy it. If it won't enrich your life, then you shouldn't buy it ever.
The headline makes the content look far more devious than it is. There are two things you should know about price discrimination and online shopping:
1) If you get the cheapest price online, then you shouldn't worry about price discrimination.
2) Price discrimination often isn't price discrimination at all. Pay more for shoes after a certain time? Perhaps the people that shop after 7PM are more likely to take advantage of the customer service and return policies, so they are actually paying for the shoes and customer service. Price tag different if you live in the suburbs? Perhaps the people who live in the suburbs are harder to deliver to, so the delivery cost is built into the price.
Price discrimination by definition is two identical products offered at different prices. If on the other hand you can find a difference in two seemingly identical products then it isn't pure price discrimination.
And seemingly different price differences have been around long before the internet. Example: coupons for the grocery store. Airlines are just an extreme example of this.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
At first, I thought I was looking at a shitty summary, but no - the whole article rambles on like that.
What exactly are you saving for? If you die at 89 year old tomorrow with $10 million in the bank, what good was that $10 million to you?
This is a straw-man. You presuppose conditions that are not only of your own devising, but are highly unlikely and exceedingly rare. Most don't even live to 89, and most that do aren't sitting on that kind of a pile of cash, or if they are it's because they're still earning through their investments and are living the way that they want to, they're not denying themselves.
Most people that make a point of planning their long-term finances do so with an eye toward maintaining a comfortable standard of living throughout their lives, including during retirement. They do not want to lose quality of life when they no longer have an income. This means hitting peak savings at retirement age, where the money plus any further interest or growth will last for the remaining years in roughly the same amount as when one was working.
Saving for the future does not mean having to live like a pauper unless one has a job that pays incredibly poorly, but it does mean having discipline to avoid squandering one's money frivolously.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It is sort-of new, depending on your time frame. A 10% profit used to be the respectable and moral price. Now it's a numbers game and the well being of the customer doesn't even enter the picture. Go read the stories from sales, marketing, and product engineers from some of the large companies. They do whatever it takes to gain a few percentage points as it's all gamified. The fact that some of their pre-packaged meals are known to have effectively no nutrients is just a way to keep costs down. They're not feeding it to their kids so no worries.
One of the current business fads is to push for the no. Meaning continually up-selling until the target gives you a firm no. Basically its a strategy to pray on the people pleaser segment of the population as they have trouble saying no to people. The last sale guy I talked to got upset that he spent XX minutes talking to me and I didn't buy anything thus he his wasted time. He tried to make me feel bad for not doing whatever the cold caller asked for. Sales people and the management above them are all scum.
"The right price" is an euphemism for finding the maximum price any specific customer will pay, IOW the price that hurts the most while not actually stopping the purchase. Price gauging is a way to maximise profits.
If you look at management theory, specifically Peter Drucker says that maximising profits is entirely the wrong focus for the company. The why he explains pretty well himself.
Me, I add that in addition it minimises marginal utility for the customer, thereby making the company more vulnerable to competition. Only one competitor has to figure out how to undercut the exotic price gauger, for example by crawling good prices and locking them in somehow, then offering them to whoever wants to take them. Of course, those with the most disposable income, the rich, are going to make use of this sort of thing first. That makes exotic right price finding a bottom feeder strategy.
Much of the world still considers haggling over price a shopping standard. From open air butchers auctioning off product, to roadside vendors dickering over price. If you pay asking price you are very likely over-paying.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I know everyone hates regulation, but hopefully they will come to hate cold calls more. I don't begrudge the employees or their companies. You're obligated to do what you can do so long as it's legal and won't have a net negative impact. It's how competition works.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!
What clueless douche doesn't realize is that the article is really about which sale price will produce the most sales with the highest profit. What dipshit anti-capitalist doesn't realize is that there are websites and tools that consumers can use to maximize they buying power to get the best price.
You do know that liberals are generally bad with money, right?
I stay away from retailers with auto pricing algorithms that run non stop. Looking at you newegg. Used to be a good store. Now it's just irritating because any time there is s good deal the computer starts jacking up the price until it's not so good anymore.
Priced insurance on s bike the other day. Rate is literally half as much if I tell them I currently have insurance. Tells me they attempt to screw you hoping youre too lazy to shop around. That's after they've made you invest a lot of time in being datamined if you're dumb enough to put in real info for a quote.
The easiest way to see price discrimination is to go to the rich side of town and go to the grocery store. Observe the price of milk, hamburger, cheese and gasoline. Now to to the poor side of town, repeat.
Clue - if the rich folks think the price is too high on common items, they have the means and time to seek a lower price on commodity items. The poorer side of town is usually time and/or mobility constrained and won't do so.
I noticed that on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), I will see different prices on things like airline tickets or car prices. (You'll need to use source obfuscation - EG hide your real IP). Hint - most car sites are run on exactly the same back ends as all the others.
Also - if you notice a letter code on price tags (pretty rare now days) think I N T R O D U C E S. 10 letters. assign a number for each. This is the cost of the item to the store. Stupid store owners will use 0 - 9 in order. The most common is to assign either even or odd numbers to the first 5, then vice versa.
Smart shop keepers use an initial digit or code, then pick any 10 letter word with no repeating letters. There are over 80 words starting with "B" that don't repeat letters - BLOCKHEADS is one. I like to find these shops, figure out the "code", then consistently offer the owner (Never an employee that might not know the code) exactly one cent above their cost. I like to see just how long it takes the shop owner to figure out I know what he's doing. My all time best effort is 22 years and counting - but he may just be playing stupid. When I have a special order I can't get anywhere else, I'll pay for it up front and don't haggle the price.
That said, I'm a firm believer in enlightened self interest. In my hobby, there are a lot of things I could order on line and save about 40%. But I still buy local and pay full retail. While I could save some bucks by ordering a week in advance, it's in my interest to have it local, where I can walk in and walk out with what I need.
Sometimes a cheap price hurts me more in the long run than other considerations. Besides, despite violently opposing political views, this is a guy that I could call at 3AM and know he'd come help.
And vice versa.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The concept of "The Channel" is just being extended to the Consumer realm. I loathe "The Channel". (Note, it is always capitalized this way. Another term is "VAR" for "Value Added Reseller". The only value added is to the Middleman's wallet.)
"The Channel" are the Middlemen, and are often encountered in B2B transactions. Say that you want to buy an Isolation Transformer for your Spectrometer. (This is a real case.) You Spec it out from Acme online, (Yes, there really is an Acme...), find 1KVA with 50KV Insulation suffices nicely, you hit the "Quote" button...
And then you are taken to a page where you have to put down all of your Professional Details, so that a Salesman can get back to you by phone with a quote. You aren't given a price, or even a range of prices, until some Willy Loman can get ahold of you personally from his Boiler Room.
This is tremendously irritating, so much so that we had Professional Buyers to deal with it. It was called "Purchasing" and once some details under the table were sorted out, they added their 35% Overhead.
"Boomerang Commerce" is a logical outcome; they see themselves as the Consumer equivalent of 'The Channel", where Price Transparency isn't something encouraged, it is something to be thoroughly obscured, so that they can take their Cut.
"What dipshit anti-capitalist doesn't realize is that there are websites and tools that consumers can use to maximize they buying power to get the best price."
Oh, really? I on occasion trust Consumer Reports. And that's as far as it goes. What is needed are websites and tools with the explicit goal of screwing the Middlemen. How this gets paid for is open to speculation.
Now it's a numbers game and the well being of the customer doesn't even enter the picture.
When, pray tell, was your mythical golden age when corporations put the "well being" of the customer before profit?
Go read the stories from sales, marketing, and product engineers
Go read The Jungle, Unsafe at Any Speed, or King Leopold's Ghost and perhaps you can disabuse yourself of the notion that greed is a new phenomena.
In 1988, Diamond Shamrock paid Frontier Capital (San Antonio) to develop an automated gas pump pricing system. Included in this system was the ability to alter pump prices on a minute-by-minute basis according to time of day. Seven stations in San Antonio deployed a system that bumped gasoline prices between $0.06 and $0.12 during rush hours, 07:00 through 09:30 and 14:30 through 18:00. This system was based on Gilbarco gasoline pumps and custom microprocessor boards based on Motorola 6801 CPUs.
Development of this system proceeded through early 1990, when the decision was made to delay rollout of these systems indefinitely. In 1996, Canadian company bought Diamond Shamrock and decided not to acquire the technology developed by Frontier.
Nothing new. It's more visible now, though.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Well a lot of people buying stuff are clueless.
Or to quote H. L. Mencken "No one in this world, so far as I knowâ"and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help meâ"has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
So in great many of those cases those tricks will work - unfortunately. I say unfortunately because it encourages being sleazy, not out of any special fondness of idiots.
This has been going on long before the internet and still continues today in regular brick and mortar stores. I can walk into a convenience store in a poor neighborhood and they'll perpetually have some items on sale at a pretty competitive price regionally and then go to another location owned by the same owner in a wealthy neighborhood and it's perpetually marked up 300%.
This. Also, standardized pricing is a relatively new phenomenon as far as global history is concerned and even today is mostly true of mass market items only. If you live(d) in a bartering society merchants would absolutely sell you the same thing at different prices different times of the day, etc. Furthermore, in any sort of person to person transaction you are sized up as to what you will pay and that (or a bit more) is probably the price at which it's offered. In dealing with a lot of sales of professional specialized items to small businesses, sole proprietors, non-profits, etc. really anything where you get a "quote" first the price might vary depending on what your ability to pay is.
This type of "big-data pricing" might be doing these things on a larger scale, and it's probably too early say definitively whether this is good or bad for the average consumer (on average it may actually be the same as the current average sales price of a given product), but it's not fundamentally new.
Why is there a large margin of white space on the right? How can I make this go away?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
You do know that liberals are generally bad with money, right?
Yeah, that's probably why they are in general more wealthy than conservatives.
Look the way I learned it, when you have a semi functional free market, prices will tend to go toward what the market will bear : too high and consumers go away, too low and firm don't make enough benefit/don't innovate/don't invest/go away. Since when is having firm trying to go for the maximum price the market CAN bear about "sucker" ? This is madness.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Online is much better, actually. As well as clearing cookies and using different browsers/VPNs, just abandoning your shopping cart often generates a discount coupon. Search engines and price comparison sites are more efficient than going to 20 different physical shops. You can Google for coupon codes too.
If I could do grocery shopping online reasonably well I would rarely go to town any more. Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That I only ever browse Amazon anymore to browse and then go get the same thing on eBay or locally only cheaper and with much faster shipping.
New movies... Well lets see $20 on Amazon assuming they will even sell it to you without prime... $7 for same thing on eBay.
I think it will be a very long time before machine learning algorithms are able to deal with conflicting information or do anything other than seek locally optimal solutions.
This is a variation of the same old story where stores use "big data" to only stock shelves with what has been shown to make the most money only for customers to get annoyed they don't have everything on their list and shop elsewhere.
When enough people get annoyed at the games enough to modify their behavior and go elsewhere as I have done all their super fancy algorithms and or cheap genetic A/B schemes still won't have a clue on earth why.
It was not a straw-man. You conveniently left out the context: "Why do you buy things you don't need, and who compels you to do this?"
In the GP, it was implied that buying things is bad because money should be saved rather than spent.
... any time there is s good deal the computer starts jacking up the price until it's not so good anymore.
There is more to life than obsessing whether a particular price is the lowest possible price one could pay. Like, for example, the amount of time spent looking for the "best" price on everything.
A "good" price is whatever the buyer thinks an item is worth. When I shop online, unless it's a large ticket item, if the price seems reasonable for something, and if there's no apparent gouging for shipping costs, that's good enough. I order it and move on with my life.
Thats why i hate lawyers. They are the middle men between me and justice.
Hey, if I get crap cheaper if I am from Bangladesh, VPNs there will become the next big thing. They practically pay for themselves.
Two can play that game. If one side starts tweaking the variables, expect the other to play along.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are you smart enough to factor the time used shopping around?
I used 10 hours at least to search for new phone. If I had been working I could have bought 2 phones.
Yes, but not for the same reasons. What the net is allowing companies to do is charge different prices for the same exact product based on their assessment of the consumer. Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
"Sir, if you don't like to pay 50 euros for that loaf of bread, I'd like you to know there are tools you can use to look for cheaper deals on bread. Just make sure to clean your cookies and log out of any social networks and put a bag over your head to avoid facial recognition, and remember to enter the store in between 10 and 11:30 and you'll get the maximal discount. But don't be late, the rush hour of bread begins at 11:35 and prices double, or triple for those with a higher education."
Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world? That instead of a price tag on a product conveying the price information openly to everyone the tags would be empty codes that you scan and then get the price, 'tailored just for you' on your phone?
The problem is most people don't realize that this is even happening so many people think the price they're getting from say, some flight booking site is the same as it is for everyone else. They've no idea that the price may well be affected by their past searches on the site and other online behavior.
Currently on products and services using this kind of pricing there's no way for a consumer to know the true 'base price' of the product they're buying. This means that a lot of the price information is completely lost, meaning that the price mechanism no longer functions as it used to. Discount information is always shown to the customer obviously, but under these systems it's possible that even the supposed 'discounted price' you're getting is higher than what the guy next door is paying without any discounts if the price before discount for you was set higher based on your identifier information.
Price search services themselves are not a magical solution to this because they do not remove this issue. You still have no way of knowing whether or not the 'cheapest price' given to you by a search engine is the same as the 'cheapest price' given to someone else using a different operating system or a device and who hasn't queried the same product a couple times before.
I'm no anti-capitalist, but in the name of a free and fair trade I do believe consumers are entitled to equal treatment and transparency when it comes to prices. I'm not saying it's wrong for a company to charge you less/more because of X, Y or Z. I'm saying if that is done you should have access to those modifiers and see why they're charging that extra or giving that discount for you. It's likely true that many of the sites would lose business doing this, but that in and of itself should highlight you the problem at hand: keeping the modifiers secret currently only benefits the sellers and weakens the position of the consumer on the market by hiding information.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
It's entirely new. Because it's NOT the highest price the market will bear. It's the highest price YOU PERSONALLY will bear.
The only places that has previously existed is big-ticket items where corporations are rarely involved - like selling a house and trying to negotiate the highest price a potential buyer may pay, but at least that was a negotiation between relative equals. You were both just individuals without an army of lawyers, and both at least economically strong enough to buy a house like that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony. That's exactly what these companies do - and it ought to be just as illegal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
Seriously? Between the major supermarket chains and Ocado all providing online order / home delivery, none of them works for you? I'll admit, I gave up on Tesco repeatedly sending me things that were one day away from their use-by date, but there's a reasonable amount of competition.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm waiting for this formula to come to utilities. Then people will really be screaming "unfair"!
I mainly go to M&S and Waitrose... It's just not worth skimping on food, it's too important. Ocado doesn't deliver to my area.
I have tried the others, but like you have issues with stuff being nearly out of date or stupid substitutions. It's just not quite there yet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
For what it's worth, I've had under a dozen substitutions in five years of using Ocado (fewer than I got in any six month period with Tesco before that) and things always come with long shelf lives. They also have excellent customer support and will quickly fix anything that they get wrong.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
. . . . their personalities are de-facto birth control. . . . (grin)
"(Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)"
Perhaps Amazon can explain why the price shown to me for individual music tracks is .30 higher ( each ) than it is when my other half looks at the exact same track. Not that thirty cents bothers me, but they most certainly do not treat all customers the same and I'm curious what the algorithm is.
I havent looked at other goods they offer because I'm too lazy, but they aren't losing money.
I saw this in action a year or two ago (variable pricing online) and asked about it on a couple tech forums, and everyone who responded had no idea WTF I was talking about. And I could not find any explanation for it...
It's basically variable pricing that is based on your browsing history. That sounds simple enough, but different websites seemed to be using the opposite algorithms,,, if you visited a site now and checked the price on something, and then checked again in an hour, the 1-hour price might be a few percent higher. -Or lower... And likewise, if you checked back in a day, or 3-4 days from now, you might get two more different prices. That may be higher or lower than the [now] price, and the [1-hour] price.
I don't blame anyone for trying to use optimized pricing strategies.
The reason I was curious about it, was because I was wondering what is the process used and more importantly--how can one take maximum advantage of it? Of course at that point I was assuming there would be one method that was pretty similar across sites, but there does not seem to be. If you check a price for a particular item and then come back an hour later to that same item's page, the price may be higher, or may now be lower. Not a HUGE amount; you might have a $25 item get lowered to $22 or bumped up to $27. Or maybe $32. But something here is definitely going on, and some of the bigger online PC parts places are doing it.
Somebody already mentioned one place you see this in action: Newegg. I believe I was shopping for desktop PC parts when I first saw it, so you might keep an eye out when browsing those sites. I've not noticed it at other sites yet, but then, I do a lot of comparison shopping when I'm buying PC parts. And I use Google for normal searches, and that may be playing a big role in the process.
Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers' spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.
Then why are they price changes and not price decreases?
I have no particular problem with varying price-points, but I don't see that Amazon gets to say it's intended for the customer's benefit.
They deliver to the other side of my street, annoyingly. I've heard good things about Ocado from other people too, I'd love to give them a try.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do you actually think that at some point prices were based on maintaining a "moral" 10% profit margin? That was never the case. Prices are a product of market forces, an individual supplier's profit margin is the deciding factor for whether or not they stay in the market. So profits aren't a component of the market price, the market price determines profits.
Almost everything I buy on Amazon goes up in price after I buy it, and over about 400 purchases I have even been able to determine that there is correlation between user reviews and the magnitude of post-purchase price changes. Products with good user reviews go up by more than products with average reviews. Also, products that *I* give a good review for go WAY up: 10-20% in some cases.
So you're saying that those who whine the most about the pay gap are flaming hypocrites.
I've never found that I would pay what 'most' people would pay for an item. Call me cheap if you will. Does this mean tailored pricing will sell me things for less?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Me paying what I am willing to pay for something I want isn't making me a sucker.
It's really the most ideal, individualized capitalism possible.
If I pay more than Mary or Bill, it's because either I have more resources and prices matter less to me, or I want it more. You can't really get more essentially Adam Smith than that. Universalized consistent pricing is a relic of the industrial era.
-Styopa
There was a time when a selection of merchants decided to sell all of their product at what they felt was a moral profit margin (I do not know what that margin was, it was probably more than 10%). Study the history of markets and you will learn that the reason we had the economic system where just about everything was sold for a flat price was because Quaker merchants felt it was dishonest to haggle over prices. They set their prices at what they considered to be a moral profit margin and that was the price they charged everyone. You either paid their asking price, or you went somewhere else...but, their asking price was the same for every customer. It did not take long before any merchant who did not follow such a strategy was out of business.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
What about the other half of the story, where they have found out all about your spending habits, that they don't know is already in their data banks to arrive at the perceived appropriate price point?
If you're reasonably intelligent, you can use the same type of mindset in reverse for your own personal benefit. This is all part of Game Theory. You either learn how to play the game or the game plays you. The option that's not on the table is to end the game or exchange it with a more reasonable game. Such is life.
We'll make great pets
Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony.
[Citation needed.]
the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets
Oh, dear, an article by a Marxist still living in 1860. They love them class warfare vocabulary.
The online shopping sites are not trying to get the highest price they can for every product. They are trying to get the optimal price for every product.
Often times the optimal price can be the lowest price, or close to it. One only needs to look at Walmart's position at #1 on the Fortune 500 to understand this is true.
The optimal price is one that enables the highest overall profit for the company. Keeping customers coming back is absolutely one requirement for maximizing profit. Low prices directly benefit consumers and producers in many markets.
What Marxists fail to understand is that profit is the information signal that is sent through the economy from consumers to producers to indicate that they approve of what they are doing. A 'Like button' in the parlance of our times.
Profit is a very good thing, and it benefits consumers by constantly refining the goods available on the market and the prices of those goods.
Granted, Marx didn't have the benefit of game theory or information theory to work with, but modern writers have no excuse for ignoring modern learning (that's already 60-80 years old). Here's a recent Freakonomics episode on price elasticity that might help some aspiring writers (or even economists) who don't even want to take the time to read.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Pet peeve: We know this post of bogus because of the phrase "of Us All." I'll routinely hear new articles with the word "all" or "everyone" and yet no news person has ever asked we whether I was in the group "everyone" is in. I think journalists should either stop using such words, or back their statements up by consulting "everyone."
Amazon and other on-line merchants are certainly not making a sucker of me. They may well be overcharging me, but since on average I spent around $100 a year, and I comparison shop, they aren't getting much money from me. So have it, celebrate you the 10% or whatever you overcharge me, and laugh all the way to the back depositing the pennies a day you're getting from me.
Or The Road to Serfdom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom). Ralph Nader was/is a twat.
If that IS going on, just use something like random user agent plug in, that "tells" the site it's a different OS all the time. Go to the site, check something, then hit the random user agent to tell it that you are a different browser and OS, and see if it changes.
Meanwhile, isn't that right half of the screen with simple pleasing nothing on it really nice.
Looking
forward
to
posts
that
look
like
this!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Any actual capitalist necessarily wants a healthy market. A healthy market requires price transparency. Without that, the whole system fails badly.
So is not dying of smallpox. Standardized pricing is not as big an advancement, but it definitely is an advancement.
Have you ever lived in such a society? Or is this your idealized free market assumptions?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world?
One of the grocery stores (Kroger/King Soopers/City Market group) here is getting close to that with their loyalty rewards program. You can get personalized coupons through their phone app. I'm sure a number of the variables you listed, and others, play into what coupons, and at what discounts, are provided to individual users. I don't have the app, only a card with no phone number attached, so I couldn't elaborate much more. I'm aware of this b/c my neighbor was explaining all the ways the app kept track of her shopping habits and then gifted her with coupons. She went on and on about how wonderful it all was to only have to bring her phone and not keep track of physical coupons.
file:
It's not the same. The price in Beverly Hills is the same no matter who you are. Everyone sees the same price. The coupons are available to everyone and offer the same discount to everyone. The sale is marked for all to see.
Imagine if there was no point at all in getting advice from a friend, acquaintance, or coworker about where the find the best price on X because the price will be different for you anyway. Also no point in shopping for the best price because by the time you've checked prices at 3 or 4 places, they will all be different when you click to buy.
One of the current business fads is to push for the no. Meaning continually up-selling until the target gives you a firm no.
Well now, that's a brilliant strategy. Once I say no and am pissed, I'm finished and out the door. I'll give a "polite no thank you" at first, but if I have to get firm about it - boom, outa here.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I am quite glad to hear somebody implemented what I call a just price.
I have no moral imputus to argue over their profit margin but I see they charged all the same amount and did not squeeze.
You do know that liberals are generally bad with money, right?
Yeah, that's probably why they are in general more wealthy than conservatives.
Quiet! No one is supposed to know that. When I had my side business, I was shocked to find out that my wealthiest and most generous patrons were in fact not right wingers. Same for my wife in the housing industry. Good liberal customers. And they were a hellava lot better to work with than the right wingers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So you're saying that those who whine the most about the pay gap are flaming hypocrites.
Nope, just people who understand how things work.
In order to have people buy your stuff, you need the people who might buy your stuff to have the money to buy your stuff.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you're talking about 'cost-plus' pricing where the seller adds a fixed margin on top of the costs that go into producing something, this is only one of a number of pricing strategies. Even in cost plus, there's no (and has never been) any arbitrary figure of 10% set based on morality or respectability. The price of a product or service is always what the market will bear. Profit margin in the diamond industry is as high as 30%. The airline industry on the other hand considers 5% cause for celebration.
This is a product of snowflake think.
Sadly, we've raised a sheltered generation of kids that thing the world is fair, everyone is equal, business and all manner of human interaction is moral, and above all else, protect everyones self esteem.
Yes, for some reason, people are now attaching the word 'moral' to fiscal transactions...job salaries, welfare.....etc. Hell, I've had them talking about morality in taxation...really?
Money has never been about morals. It is there to earn the person/company a profit, to pay its employees and owners. Nothing more.
Taxes are there to fund the govt. services to the populace...nothing morality based at all.
But, you are running more and more into "Snowflake Think" of this type.
Hmm...I may have just coined a phrase here....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Of course!
People with some spare cash, are more apt to say "Let's pool our money, we'll call it taxes, and give it to $x"
Sure, works out better if people slightly less well to do, contribute too! Even if those are still above major tax breaks, and have less disposable cash...
Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony.
I truly doubt that. What law would you be violating?
In the GP, it was implied that buying things is bad because money should be saved rather than spent.
The need for instant gratification, as expressed by impulsively scratching every consumerist itch, is a foolish, shallow way to live your life. He who dies with the most toys, is still dead.
I hope restaurants move to that model too, as a way to decrease crowding and increase efficiency.
He who dies with NO toys is still dead. How exactly is it "shallow" to buy things one wants? Denying oneself the joys of life doesn't make one live longer.
If you want it and can afford to buy it, it's stupid not to buy it.
Because I hate to tell you, but stores in Beverly Hills charge more than they do in Compton for the exact same product.
Even stores in the same area will charge different prices for the exact same product. Something in a hardware store will usually cost half the price of the exact same item (in different packaging but probably all manufactured in the same place) in the craft store next door. Why? Because the craft people will pay more. Amazon doesn't know if you're looking for a magnetic holder for nuts and bolts or one for pins and needles though, so they need other ways to find your breaking point. And they will find it. Consumers are handy packets of processed fruits and vegetables and Amazon is the $400 packet squeezer.
If you want it and can afford to buy it, it's stupid not to buy it.
I don't know about you, but to quote writer Theodore Sturgeon, "...you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true." I learned this lesson as a child when I spent my allowance money that I'd saved up on stupid crap that I was convinced I wanted, only to find out that the thing I wanted either wasn't what it was made out to be or that my desire was not really my own. Now I was stuck with thing that I did not really want and no money.
I want a real smithing anvil and some tools. I could spend the thousands of dollars for the setup, but it'll probably get used only intermittently, as that kind of metalworking does not make for a casual hobby. I do not buy it because while I can afford it, I can also keep my money for when I find something that I really do want to have, or when I stumble across a genuinely good deal for something I can then pounce on it.
Be judicious with your means. Don't squander it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Go to any fish market in Europe. At the end of the day, they are selling the fish for less so they don't have to take it back and store it.
I thought Amazon got in trouble a couple of years back, because targeted pricing was illegal in the US.
Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
Not too many years ago, those were, in fact, standard practices by nearly all merchants. It's only been for the last century or two that stores have gotten in the habit of having fixed, marked prices. Before, prices were negotiated and you can bet that the merchant took into account everything he could see about the customer when deciding what price he could get.
The modern version is a little different, of course, because the online retailer *appears* to have a fixed, marked price, and there isn't an opportunity for interactive negotiation. But it's also different because the customer can easily shop a dozen other stores almost effortlessly. The customer can also do something like "wishlist" an item, which is a signal to the seller that the customer is interested in buying, but not willing to pay the posted price right now... which means there's a good chance that a slightly lower price will generate a sale.
So, I think buyers who are willing to be a little careful can effectively negotiate, and arguably hold the stronger position against online retailers. Buyers who are willing to take the first price offered, on the other hand, will pay in dollars for the time they save.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This already happens, except that they have multiple store fronts so the upscale people don't have to shop with the downscale people.
That's funny, my impression of Beverly Hills was that no one saw any prices.
"If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
Yep, I've seen this with Target vs Dayton, same parent company, same product, much larger markup on the Dayton version of the product.
Your phrase probably won't take off, because nobody is going to know what it means. I've already lost track of the evoution of this "snowflake" meme. Is it still just a euphemism for Republicans? For millennials? For millennials and baby boomers but not Gen X? Maybe even for liberals now, too? Nobody knows what it means anymore. There isn't a single person who hasn't been labeled a "snowflake" yet. Trump==Snowflake. Bernie==Snowflake. NY Businessman==Snowflake. College dropout who moves in Denver to smoke legal pot==Snowflake. Construction worker==Snowflake. Gay dancer dressed like construction worker==Snowflake. Remember when it used to just mean any person who has strong preferences about.. whatever the context of the discussion?
You're already using an overloaded term, and just making it even more vague.
Now it looks like you're saying that it's related to protecting everyone's self-esteem, when just a minute ago, we were talking about how to maximize profit. Strategies for maximizing revenue are now "snowflake think?" Good grief, next you're going to have commies breaking that same business' windows during an anti-free-trade protest be "snowflake thinkers" too. You might wanna work on that phrase, before you release it.
So for mothers day we got the MIL a set of black cultured pearls - necklace, bracelet and earrings. Retail it would have cost about $150, on Amazon the whole kit was $85.
And bed sheets - seriously good pricing on those too.
in the name of a free and fair trade I do believe consumers are entitled to equal treatment and transparency when it comes to prices
what you believe, sunshine, isn't important, unless you have buying power
why would anyone pay attention to your little whine?
why would YOU pay attention to the complaint of anyone else buying from you, if you decide that you wish to sell your services or goods at different prices based on your own business acumen? hmmmm ?
do you offer a one-off discount to secure a new relationship?
do you offer a bulk buy discount that depends on your existing stock levels?
welcome to humanity, and the reality of what you so loosely and misguidedly call "free" trade
your conceot of "fair" trade is equally misled, but you should know, that in the general parlance of our times, "free" and "fair" are polar opposites in terms of outcomes - you just can't have BOTH
yes, you are an anti-capitalist, because a capitalist enjoys using his CAPITAL to influence his outcomes, usually to the disadvantage of others, including entitled little sheep like you, that don't have the influence to affect the outcome in your own favour
perhaps you should, instead, reflect on your presumably "pro-capitalist" stance and see how that REALLY affects your situation instead of assuming your adopted ideology naturally leads to better results for your own pocket because magic ... ?
I'm lucky enough to have both Occado and Amazon's new Fresh service as food providers in my area. I too have virtually given up on Tesco (both delivery and in-store) due to nearly out of date items being delivered, and worse, massively (like a several weeks) out of date items being on the shelves in store. The problem is I live in an "affordable" i.e. poor area of South London, and no-one seems to give a damn in the utterly disgusting store. I have started a one man complaint campaign whenever I shop there, so hopefully I can change things.
Out of the two delivery services Occado is clearly the best, I would heartily recommend it, however it is very expensive for what you get. Having tried Amazon's service I am actually quite pleased, items have a long date, they are nearly as cheap as Tesco's and the deliveries come in nice recyclable paper bags.
The problem is, they only operate in London & you need a prime account, and then to pay extra for Fresh on-top. I use prime quite a lot, and get enough food deliveries to my office (I run the office tuck shop) that I think having Fresh is worth it for me, for others maybe the monthly fee would not be worth it (and if my local Tesco didn't suck badly, I would just shop there)
Because I hate to tell you, but stores in Beverly Hills charge more than they do in Compton for the exact same product.
And Wal-Mart charges less than Macy's. What's your point?
And their are these things called "sales" and "coupons" to differentiate pricing even at the same store.
Yep, but my coupon/sale shouldn't be for %10 off while yours is for %25 percent off
Study should be redone, comparing price differential online with those off-line.
Why? I guess there might be a difference, but the REAl problem is that there is a difference in price between shoppers AT ALL.
The best option is not to play.
Buy less. Use the library. Creative commons and the like.
Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Do without
I thought this excerpt was telling:
And how did she shop for herself?
âoeI do not shop,â Patten said.
In what sense?, I asked, confused.
âoeI just gave up,â she said. âoeI just stopped shopping.â
I think a lot of people are just fatigued from this sort of pricing shenanigans.
Personally, I would lump the surcharge for blowing smoke up the customer's ass as part of the actual product for most of the merchandise available in Beverly Hills. When you're wealthy enough, the retail experience is the product, and what you actually take home is just the Broadway playbill souvenir.
Consumer surplus relates to marginal utility, where the consumer surplus is the difference between the purchase of the product or service and the subjective value, i.e. utility, to the consumer. When consumer surplus reaches zero, i.e. the value of the product or service is equal to the purchase price, the consumer ceases purchasing the product or service. Source: Alfred Marshall.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Yet JC Penny tried a marketing strategy they called something like the "Square Deal" with fixed prices (no amazing looking sales) and no $x.99 prices; the idea failed miserably https://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/06/15/jc-penneys-epic-rebranding-fail/#3506bad29e8f
Apparently many consumers DO want to believe that they are buying merchandise at 40% 50% 60% off and more!
I happen to like fixed pricing because there are so many ways in which variable pricing can be abused... today it might be whether you have an Apple product. Tomorrow it might be deliberate race-based, gender-based, etc. Careful studies to show what physical/psychological characteristics indicate buyers who are less sensitive to price, for whatever reason.
In the end the market becomes a lot less efficient (because buyers AND sellers are spending so much time trying to outwit each other) and perhaps people stop buying as much. I know that I would rather just not buy some of the things I buy if I have to spend hours trying to make sure I'm not getting screwed by pricing. Whether this ultimate effect would be a good thing or not can be debated, but I'm going to lean towards it not being good. Having a vibrant market that encourages economic exchanges seems to be a net good (I am not an economist, however).
The 15 year old in me says "these greedy corporate bastards are trying to extract every last cent out of us!" My modern day self that has studied lots of economics says "This is actually expected and perhaps even desired behavior from a highly efficient marketplace"
It used to be, companies would use things like mail-in-rebates. Sell the device for $100 dollars, but offer a $20 dollar rebate. With this pricing scheme you are basically marketing the product to the low-income consumers at $80 since cash-strapped consumers are more likely to take the time to mail in a rebate, but more affluent folks might not bother and just pay $100. This lets companies have flexible prices for different market demographics but is pretty inefficient. The mailing of the rebate, processing on the companies side, and then mailing a check back to the consumer all wastes time and money. Presumably Amazon could just tell if you were in the lower income bracket and offer you the $80 price and Mr. I-just-bought-an-expensive-VR-gaming-headset can be shown the $100 price point.
You seem to be confused on the concept of being able to afford something. Being able to afford something doesn't mean you're broke after you buy it. Just because you have enough money to buy something doesn't mean you can afford it.
I could "afford" to buy a Lamborghini by your definition, but not by mine.
Reminds me of Rachel Law's project Vortex.
Does anyone remember that? A short film was made about her project a few years back. Haven't heard much about it since.
https://www.fandor.com/films/vortex
Gamefied advertising cookie/profile jamming.
Are you smart enough to factor the time used shopping around?
I used 10 hours at least to search for new phone. If I had been working I could have bought 2 phones.
No you couldn't have. If you hadn't spent that 10 hours shopping for a phone, you would have been doing something else you didn't get paid to do.
How is this different than going into a store, asking the owner how much a hat is. He responds with $15 to which you respond OK, he realizes that he didn't ask enough and says he meant $25? This happened to me in Russia. Actually people haggled over the price of everything. My parents had a friend (from Russia) visiting the US and she would try to haggle over the marked price on items in a store. She would go back and forth for half an hour to save $2 (at which the store manager was like whatever, just get out).
You can never get screwed by pricing if you always pay what something is worth to you.
that would be a felony.
Fake news
Yes, but not for the same reasons. What the net is allowing companies to do is charge different prices for the same exact product based on their assessment of the consumer. Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
Around here Home Depot does exactly this. The store my my sister's house is in a more affluent district. The one by my house, which is 10 miles away, is in a less affluent district, and their prices are set accordingly. And you can't tell me delivery is more. as well.. 10 miles.
Higher rent for the Home Depot store in the more affluent district?
Go to a site. Log in. Put what you want in the cart. Close your browser. Wait 24 hours for the "you left something behind" email with a 10% off coupon. Log in as a new user, get the new user discount, Add it to the 10% discount.
Their problem is that with all the "tricks", if you find out how to game them, you'll get a lower price than anyone else. And they work, because every sap thinks they got a better deal than most.
They learned this trick from used car dealers. It's an ancient trick.
Learn to love Alaska
Okay, that's interesting. I figured that haggling declined as markets grew in size and volume; had no idea about the Quaker influence. Their 'moral profit margin' idea didn't catch on quite as well though. Maybe that would have been different had the British not tried to lock down trade - which drove many Boston based merchants to turn to smuggling, and black markets have high margins on account of the risk. By the turn of the 19th century, "Yankee Traders" had quite the reputation, and it wasn't for their upstanding morals.
You mean people (and companies) are allowed to decide what they want to trade for stuff, instead of having all fixed prices??
Horrendous! 8-o
I bet it won't last long! At least not much longer than six thousand years or so... ;-)
[/snark]
>This is a product of snowflake think.
And you are a product of a dying and ignorant breed.
>Sadly, we've raised a sheltered generation of kids that thing the world is fair, everyone is equal, business and all manner of human interaction is moral, and above all else, protect everyones self esteem.
Wait, so you're bashing yourself by putting yourself in the 'we' group? What? Huh?
>and above all else, protect everyones self esteem.
Ah yes, because going to the unemployment office, paying taxes, driving to work and working in shit jobs accomplishes this well. /s
>Yes, for some reason, people are now attaching the word 'moral' to fiscal transactions
Nobody tell this idiot about charity, donations, religious tax exemptions, moral hazard, trade wars, government subsidies, etc.
> I've had them talking about morality in taxation...really?
Many people that are not assholes would vote that taxes should be equal to or higher for richer people as compared to poor people. E.G. - healthcare tax subsidies and capital gains are near the top of that list.
>Money has never been about morals.
Oh my actual God. You've gone full retard. You've gone so conservative that you've come out the other side. This would be like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell wanting to cut the federal budget so much, that he cut ALL spending and passed a budget of $0, and it was signed by the President.
Money is a transaction of trust. Cash is only worth what value other people will exchange for it. Inflation is *literally* the erosion of the trust in the absolute value of a currency, but that can be due to primarily economic forces or, more likely, government actions. After all, money, for 99% of the world, is fiat currency that is distributed by a government.
>Taxes are there to fund the govt. services to the populace...nothing morality based at all.
Now this is the kind of bullshit that I would expect from a retarded conservative like yourself. It's a philosophical point that requires nuance, and your kind is generally terrible with nuance.
Who defines "gov't services"? No, I'm actually being serious, because there is a hell of a lot of difference between what federal, state and local legislatures will put into law vs what you actually have to pay in taxes, how much and for what reason.
For example, I would *love* if we cut defense spending entirely from overseas military bases, killed the TSA entirely, enacted a flat percentage tax on all profits at 15% (except for nonprofits that meet the current 501c(3) definition), taxed corporations and workers the same, removed states entirely, made federal voting day a national holiday, removed Daylight Savings time, removed all time zones, killed the penny, made federal election voting mandatory and allowed mail-in ballots, killed Fox News in a wave of lawsuits, made a national firearm registry, opened hundreds of thousands of mental healtthcare clinics, had the US gov't own and operate solar and wind farms, ban the vast majority of 18 wheelers and vehicles over 10,000 pounds and completely move the overland shipping industry to trains.
... Or to quote H. L. Mencken "No one in this world, so far as I know (and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me) has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." ...
What people that say such things don't understand, is that they are also one of those "plain people" / Idiots, when they are out of their area of expertise.
If you say that everyone else is stupid, then people hearing you will merly assume that -you- are the one that is stupid. Even if they claim to agree with you! ;-)
So, if it's Bad to charge someone higher prices for food or fuel just because they are rich or stranded, how is it not Bad to Tax people more just because they are rich or stranded??? 8-P
You do know that liberals are generally bad with money, right?
Yet the conservative states rely more on gov't handouts. You know that,right?
Yeah I save like a MF, because in my life I have had unforeseen expenses come up pretty regularly. Mostly medical, car, or household related. I would literally be on the street if I had not learned to save at a young age. I guess being unlucky money wise is a blessing in that you learn to be prepared. I know allot of people who get hit hard when things do not go their way.
It is sort-of new, depending on your time frame. A 10% profit used to be the respectable and moral price.
That was never the case.