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How the Quakers Became Unlikely Economic Innovators by Inventing the Price Tag (aeon.co)
Belying its simplicity and ubiquity, the price tag is a surprisingly recent economic development, Aeon magazine writes. For centuries, haggling was the norm, ultimately developing into a system that required clerks and shopkeepers to train as negotiators. In the mid-19th century, however, Quakers in the US began to believe that charging people different amounts for the same item was immoral, so they started using price tags at their stores to counter the ills of haggling. And, as this short video from NPR's Planet Money explains, by taking a moral stand, the Quakers inadvertently revealed an inefficiency in the old economic system and became improbable pricing pioneers, changing commerce and history with one simple innovation.
Who were those who invented the ".99" marketing gimmick? I don't recall...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Innovative disruptive geniuses.
I'd like to see some logical proof for this... Starting from some ethical axiom and logically arriving to this conclusion.
Because I completely do not understand, what is immoral about this...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Enough justification for salary transparency.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And what if I use paper maps or ask people how to get someplace? Or use library books as reference? You can't track me that way.
What the Quakers actually said was "my price is the same for any man, be he a pauper or a king".
I was taught that the Quakers started doing this in the early 1700's here (UK). My school was founded in 1703.
I was never convinced about the morality though. I have lived in countries where they still haggle. I bought coffee and milk from the same person nearly every day for six months, and I am pretty sure I never paid the same amount twice. Its not just about how well the customer is, or otherwise - its also about how keen the seller is to get money quick. If you are really poor, you still may get the seller to sell at a loss, rather than carry their wares home after closing time, especially if the goods are perishable. (Also true in London markets today). In the 1700's most people self employed, and were able to control their own destiny more than employees can (if you were an employee, you were not in a good position at all).
But the video is correct, in a big store, fixed prices are definitely an advantage.
And haggling school? well just try taking a taxi in any third world country - you either get it pretty quickly, or you will go broke! However, in the spirit of equality, Uber is bringing the Third world to everyone, everywhere.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Is this really what passes for trolling these days? Sad.
Combine it all the stores will know precisely how much they can charge you, and how much you can be forced to pay.
If Quakers thought it is immoral to charge different people different prices, model corporations think it is their primary mission to charge based on the customers' ability to pay, not based on reasonable profits.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In the wrong thread on top of that.
#DeleteFacebook
And then Amazon happened, where prices change depending on who is viewing the item.
#DeleteFacebook
These days, the price on the tag isn't the price. For many buyers, it's a starting point for negotiations because they think that the item in question isn't worth what's written on the tag. Of course, for the seller, it's also become a way for them to basically say that whatever they're selling is worth far more than it really is. But it doesn't stop there. Because there are legions of people who have no ability to create a product let alone a desirable one, they end up joining the ranks of bureaucracy whose mission in life is to extract money out of the flow from the creator to the consumer initially in the form of taxes but increasingly in the form of a laundry list of inscrutable fees which rarely if ever do anything productive and instead just make daily life more expensive.
Car dealerships are still in 19 century.
This is NPR. They see everything through their own lens and assume anyone who doesn't see it their way is wrong.
Stay on a page at HobbyKing for awhile and they'll pop up a discount. "we see you've been here awhile how about 5% off?..."
The Double Glazing sales industry (in the UK) brought haggling back with vengeance. They insist that can't give you a quote without sending a sales guy into your home because apparently you're unable to take half assed measurements at the same level as that the sales person who does the same and says a surveyor will have to come and measure things precisely anyway. And once in, they pull discounts out of their butts, and if you send them off they'll call you with even more discounts on top of "those are all the discounts available mate" that you got already.
In my specific case, the list price went down from 9K to 3K after all the discounts and a customer retention discount (i.e. I canceled on them shortly after taking their offer). How is that even possible?!
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
No it didn't. The free software movement started over a decade before open source and began as an ethics-based social movement which was also apparently economically viable for some including founder Stallman and some businesses such as Red Hat and Cygnus. But free software never framed the issues it addresses around a business-first philosophy.
Later after seeing how software freedom posed a threat to proprietary software control over the user, the open source development methodology was developed as a reaction that would try to reframe the issue away from caring about a user's software freedom and into a means of convincing developers to license their work to allow for nonfree derivatives (or at the least not draw strong distinctions between freedom-preserving "copyleft" licenses and "non-copyleft" licenses that don't try to preserve software freedom, hence the lack of clear distinction between these licenses in the OSI's license list). That focus aims to benefit the open source's primary audience: businesses. This development methodology is a disposable front by which its advocates endorse the idea that following their development methodology will make software more powerful and reliable. But this isn't always true, and some proprietary software is already powerful and reliable leaving "open source" as no real challenge to proprietary control over the user. But it was never meant to be such a challenge, so this philosophy's proponents don't consider this to be a problem.
The GNU Project recognized this reality long ago and wrote about it in a couple of essays (older, newer). Here's a relevant excerpt from the newer essay pointing out how a free software activist and an open source enthusiast react to learning about a powerful, reliable proprietary program:
Linus Torvalds' use and endorsement of Bitkeeper years ago is an example of the open source enthusiast. He clearly rejects software freedom (read just about anything he says on the topic) and shows his disdain to users of his fork of the Linux kernel as well; that fork of the Linux kernel contains non-free software. The GNU Linux-libre fork of the Linux kernel removes non-free software, providing a kernel one can (ironically) distribute in full compliance with the license under which the kernel Linux is distributed—the GNU GPLv2.
Digital Citizen
"Is this really what passes for trolling these days? Sad."
To convince the generic stable genius follower, you need only the 'A' from the 'AI'.
Haggling is basically lying; the buyer must lie about how much he wants the item and the seller must lie about how much it is worth. Most people consider lying to not be a moral thing to do.
aka price negotiation. It simply moves it between sellers, instead of within a seller. That is, each buyer gets the same price from a particular seller, but different sellers can have different prices. Thus the market requirement for price negotiation is preserved.
It's worth noting that the equivalent of haggling is also creeping back into online stores, where merchants will charge different prices to different customers to help them better gauge how close they are to the true market price. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn't pure price gouging. Profit is maximized at the market price. If your prices are lower than market price, your sales are increased but the lower profit per item results in a net profit decrease. But if your prices are higher than market price, the effect of reduced sales outweighs the higher profit margin, resulting in a decrease in your overall profit. So a merchant exploring demand at different prices this way can actually end up concluding that lowering their regular price for everyone is better. Increasing prices result in increased profit all the time only if your product is a necessity or almost a necessity, and you have a monopoly so buyers can't get the product from another seller.
It is no longer owned by Quakers, it is owned by Nabisco (or whoever owns Nabisco now... maybe Mondelo?)
Be sure you check the labels if you are buying it to make sure it is organic or non-GMO if you care, because it is no longer run by people who would feel concerned with clearly documented such changes.
Yet it links not to the npr but to another website that mentions npr and links to an npr page that doesn't even list that episode?
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/17/415287577/episode-633-the-birth-and-death-of-the-price-tag
Incidentally why do americans still have a 99c price when you have to add tax to the price? Doesn't that make the whole think a pointless exercise?
For my USA friends, you really need to get your government to pass legislation that requires price tags include sales tax. We have it in Australia and it makes it so much easier to know what you actually have to pay.
That was a very long post just to do s/open source s/Free S/
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Wasn't open source the default back in the day when the money was in selling hardware and the software was just thrown in?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
For inexpensive or necessary things there are price tags. No one wants to haggle over the 5c gum. .. or it is a leisure item haggling is back on the radar, or dynamic pricing ... clearly the NPR person just has someone else do the shopping for them ... or believes that appliances have price tags
However, once the price goes up
That includes:
Travel (Airfare, cruises, hotels)
Cars (fixed price hahahahhaha)
Houses (never saw a price tag affixed to a house)
Jewelry (not at Target)
Appliances
and the list goes on
I guess that is the irony that the price tag was introduced to even the field, and now is used to separate the suckers from the hagglers.
The Quakers may have introduced constant pricing to supply equality, but it has thrived due to human nature to demand equality. In the same way as relative wealth is more important to most people than absolute wealth, it doesn't matter to most if they are paying more as long as they feel no-one else is getting a better bargain.
if I were ever to become a church-going man, I do believe I'd have to be a Quaker.
From being probably the first church to oppose slavery, embrace modesty and humility as core tenets of their faith, giving equal voices to women, praying at the funeral of the mass-murderer who targeted their church and killed many kids (I could NEVER be that good, though I do yearn to be...) they have demonstrated what I consider to the "best of faith".
A far cry from the Televangelist assholes who seem to dominate here in America. Sad!!(TM)
Unreal Tournament is for pussies.
They just didnâ(TM)t get up to the brain stem, like with you.
No, it was not.
You got the source code and could fix and recompile it. But you could not sell it as a product.
There was actually usually not even a 'license' atached. It was obvious that the source ccode was for personal usage only. If you fixed something and liked to share it, you posted a diff/patch in a newsgroup or sent it to the vendor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Probably because that's not what I corrected, that's not the only thing that needed explanation, because glib quips are not informative or prone to mature discussion, and because the name of the social movement is free software not free source.
Digital Citizen
It is not lying to say "I'm not going to pay that much."
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
No Quaker car dealerships.
You don't have to talk to these people, if you don't like the "haranguing". You don't even have to say "Hello" in the morning (though you should).
But the bicycle you leave on your porch is less likely to be stolen, and you don't have to worry as much about your daughter walking home after dark... That's the sort of benefits I was talking about.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The plus side is buyer and seller don't spend a lot of time and effort haggling (and developing and maintaining their haggling skills), making buying and selling less costly.
The downside is that people get the peculiar notion that every product and service has a "true price", and from that flows the silly-ass notion that charging anything other than that "one true price" is somehow wrong.
Which if the summary is to be believed, is where the Quakers were coming from in the first place.
And from that silly-ass notion flow all manner of silly-ass laws and court rulings. And the neo-medievalism that was Marxism. (I use the past tense, even though there are still a few backwards places where the word hasn't gotten, like Cuba and academia.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.