Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
why should hardworking poor people pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their disposable income in taxes to subsidize the luxury consumption of the lazy rich?
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
Food, shelter, energy tend to have a fixed cost per person per year. At the very minimum, there should be an income level (aka standard deduction) below which you pay little or no tax. Tax discretionary income, not income needed for necessities.
One of the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends (Friends, to Quakers, but most people call them Quakers) is equality. Another is honesty and others include integrity, truth, and simplicity. Friends believe in doing their best, in other words, not doing shipshod work. If they have an item they have produced for sale, say, for example, a chair, then, as part of their belief in integrity, they will have put their best work and used quality material in making that chair.
With that in mind, at one point, and I don't know if this started with just one Friends' Meeting or how it spread, but the consensus was that if you've worked diligently on a chair and one person comes into your shop and offers you $10 for that chair, but the fair value (considering labor and materials) is $5, then it's being dishonest and acting without integrity to take the additional $5 because that person was not a good negotiator. It's taking advantage of their lack of time or inability to negotiate. On the other hand, if a Friend has put in conscientious work and has to make a choice between selling it for $3 or not selling it, that's not fair to them.
The consensus, for a while, had been on a fair price for a fair amount of work and materials. From there, it wasn't far to go to reach a conclusion that if $5 is a fair price for that chair, then, barring changes in costs for materials (or maybe labor or cost of living), then gaining more or accepting less through dickering is less than fair, to either the shop owner or the customer.
While I know many will say, "Well, if they don't take all they can get for it, they're idiots!" If your focus is on the accumulation of wealth and possessions, then, from that point of view, that may be true. But if your intent in life is not material, but on personal improvement, growth, and following your spiritual beliefs, than there is much more to be gained from turning down the extra money offered than there is in accepting it. Friends are big on fair gains as opposed to grabbing what you can when you can. (Which is why they don't gamble and generally are quite careful in selecting what stocks they will invest in.)
Remember, this may not seem moral or immoral to you or others. That's okay. For Friends, their concern is in doing what they believe is right.
That's been a function of gasoline taxes forever....
I just did some research on your claim, because it sounded absurd. Turns out it is both absurd and false.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
One key to this innovation is to really try to understand the motivation from a personal level. The existing practice required the Quaker store owner to try to haggle with the customer for every transaction - which consists in some sense of an effort of two parties to deceive each other about what one is willing to pay or accept. And the Quakers greatly emphasized strict personal honesty - so this was a frequent unpleasant experience that they wanted removed.
Additionally in a close knit community different people paying different prices is a source of social tension. Shop owners no doubt experienced customers - people of the community they knew - wanting the same price some other person of the community that they knew received. If this happens very often the temptation to simply set the same price in practice becomes strong. And if you do that why not just write it down and save the owner some time, and halt unwanted attempts to haggle.
Talk of "axioms" is irrelevant (and it should be noted that axioms are by their nature arbitrary). Although such an argument could appeal to a modern urban intellectual individualist, it would have appeared bizarre to an 18th Century close knit community devoted to personal moral improvement.
Interestingly the Quakers were also one the prime originators of the anti-slavery movement. Before the mid-18th century the notion that slavery might be intrinsically immoral was an extreme fringe notion. Slavery was generally accepted socially, legally, and religiously.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
US Government protects 100 trillion worth of property. It should be paid in proportion to the net worth of people who need that government.
Government expenses should be divided into two categories. Property rights enforcement, to be paid by networth. Individual liberty and rights enforcement. That will be paid by equal dollar amount per person.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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
40% OFF! *
* items recently marked up 50%
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
An excellent idea. At the same time, we can get rid of usury.
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others? It's precisely because as a society we want these things, we allow these things to exist to improve liquidity--to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets or see where their wealth could be used to move goods and profit from the price difference. It's also precisely we realize that that's where most of the extreme wealth comes from that we were, for a long time, willing to charge at a much higher tax rate on that wealth precisely because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either, but that's the problem with using taxes as a means of trying to maintain social justice. There exists no perfect tax code because it's impossible to adequately tax people fairly. A flat amount is unfair because wages for the same work vary by region; it's also unlikely to be payable by many. A flat proportional amount is unfair because nothing about proportionality is fair because neither wages nor costs are proportional by work or region. Nor is progressive or regressive taxation fair. In fact, it's basically impossible to have a fair tax rate let alone one that provide sufficient revenue to any government.
Beyond the fact that, no, let the left doesn't want to tax people at over 90%, I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits--maybe some corporations?--without committing tax evasion. People pay a lot more than income tax and while there are some tax credits that can grant people negative tax rates for a few years, they're not a permanent thing and the accumulation of all taxes is positive.
But you are right in one respect: those who are disabled or are mentally challenged do receive benefits in excess of what they contribute. Generally over the population, there's certainly individuals who have received a tax paid education for which they will never contribute enough in taxes or other economic benefit to overcome their cost. That's basically a universal truth of taxes: revenue is not equally collected and dispersed. In fact, if that's all taxes were, then there'd be no point in taxes. Taxes are inherently a form of wealth redistribution--I'm sure you're a big fan of the prisons and the poorhouses.
You can argue overall that certain people receive too much benefit. either because the class of benefit is unwarranted or the individual is undeserving, but with all the hand waving you're doing, I don't honestly think you even recognize where your tax dollars go or how this "theft" actual plays out. If you really want to avoid "theft", go somewhere without a government or any people.
"Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
As an Ex-Quaker for whom the whole God thing didn't really add up, the second part really did. I think Jesus erred in the ordering. But, then, I guess for a lot of people, they need a God as a reason to love thy neighbor and only through it could they accept the second commandment. I think the whole idea of being a humanist is realizing you shouldn't and don't need a belief in God or gods to be that way.
Oh, and to take the point further, Quakers are also a group dedicated to the protection of animals and would possibly be one of the first Christian sects to recognize sufficiently intelligent animals as equal in rights to humans. Certainly, it's hard to argue that it's moral to harm one and yet not another. Anyways, Quakers do like to be at the forefront of recognizing the immorality of the day and trying to firmly follow what their Inner Light tells them is correct, without committing harm to others.
I greatly dislike organized religion (though I find atheism to be equally irrational and presumptive) but damn; Quaker culture impresses me greatly.
Yeah, Friends don't aren't really an organized religion in the conventional sense. For unprogrammed meetings, you don't even have a minister telling you what to believe or think. All can speak out in Meeting for Worship equally.
The 9/10ths of a cent gasoline tax came from a governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s after he campaigned on a promise to not raise a taxes a"single red cent." Since reality (aka the deep state) requires paying for government services, he raised taxes 9/10ths of a red cent.
If you read a story like this and think to yourself "yeah, that's probably true" then it's painfully obvious that your bullshit detector is not just out of service but has been stripped for parts and sold off to fund a pyramid scheme.
You're thinking from your point of view, not the point of view of most Friends.
Regarding paying extra for a rush, remember this was in the 1700s. Yes, it's possible that someone could say, "I need a chair now and I'll pay $10." If they had a chair in stock, it would be the same to the shop owner as someone who was not in a hurry to get it. If they said, "I need a chair by tomorrow and I'll pay extra," likely the response (in that era) would be something like, "Friend, I wouldst be glad to make a chair for the as soon as I can, but I would not be able to complete it by tomorrow." On the other hand, if he could do it and it was something he could do easily, he would still do it without an extra charge. It's not likely he would stay up, for example an extra several hours, to get a chair done for a "rush" order.
As to the "true value," yes, that depends on what people are willing to pay for it, but Friends would have been making products that people can use. Furniture, tools, maybe simple toys, but not something like a fancy high end chair with extra features. A shopkeeper or tradesman would know what the value of his product or labor was. They'd know what was going on in the market and whether people were paying $5 for a chair or not. This was at a time when people weren't dealing with newer models or new features and products that were unknown quantities that are riskier to sell. These shops and businesses would generally be shy of taking risks, so they'd be staying with a proven market.
While this led to the idea of set prices (and price tags), yes, a lot has happened since this practice started and much of it has nothing to do with Friendly views or values, but with greed or profit.
(And it's worth noting that while accumulation of material wealth was not a Friend's goal, that many Friends did well in commerce because they had a reputation for fairness, quality, and integrity. Much of their income would often be saved up because of their simple lifestyle.)
Except that, of course, Amazon - and many other sites - have algorithms that adjust the price shown to the end user based on many variables, such as browser, OS platform and location, as well as whatever data they've mined from the cookies they can read, and anything they can pull together from other sources *COUGH*FaceBook*COUGH*
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Rapid City is great if you can get a job there. "Cheap" areas are often cheap due to lack of opportunity.
How's this for you: tax everyone at the same rate, but also give everyone a fixed tax credit (equal to that rate times the mean income). It's morally fair, but mathematically has the result of a progressive tax rate that goes negative below the mean, providing cash welfare for the poor.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
See, government enforces property rights, that is how rich people get to keep their riches. Poor people dont benefit by enforcement of property rights. They would rather the government breaks down in chaos so that they go with pitchforks and whack the nearest rich person and take whatever he had.
Looking at what generally happens, they seem to tend to be rather too lazy to actually bother finding a rich person--and the result tends to be that poor neighborhoods end up having to spend more to get basics, because it turns out that things like grocery stores don't bother sticking around in neighborhoods where they get robbed, even the ones that are small businesses completely owned by somebody who isn't that much richer than their neighbors.
Poor people tend to be more likely to be the victims of property crimes than rich people when you count by incidence and not value--a lot of criminals are really lazy and would rather rob a guy nearby for $2 than go to the trouble of trying to find somebody who has more money.
Tying enforcement of property rights--which is actually one of the original three natural rights--to net worth is just screwing the poor over worse.
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.
Found another Marxist (even if you think you aren't, your ideas are borrowed directly from concepts created by Marx, which makes you one by definition, if not by your own identity.)
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
If trading stocks makes you rich, then go do it, and then tell me how it works out for you. (Pro tip: Even the best actively managed funds underperform compared to index funds because their fund managers aren't oracles, and day traders are rarely rich, so keep that in mind before you toss your savings away once the trading bell rings tomorrow.) Even if you do the smart thing and go long on investments, your chances of being rich aren't that great either, unless you've already got a lot of knowledge behind you that you can use to tell you whether something is a good investment or a horrible one (pro tip: Most are horrible, even the ones that look really promising tend to be bad.)
If the lending money makes you rich, then I have to ask: Where on earth do you obtain this money that you can lend out? Furthermore, how do you know whether the borrower will pay you back? If the borrower refuses to pay, then how do you recover your losses (and yes, it WILL be a loss for you, even if you manage to get all the principal amount back from them.) And given you're supposed to get rich form this, then how long does it take for that to happen, and with what amount of money are you starting?
Don't bother answering though: Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual (hence why people who win hundreds of millions in the lottery typically end up poor within a decade) so people don't get rich this way. If they do, there's a lot more that has to occur well before then.
to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets
And this is why you don't understand anything about what makes a rich person, and that what you're saying is just a collection of regurgitated talking points. If you don't understand what I mean by this, then consider my point proven.
because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
This is perhaps the most bullshit concept of our time. Why do I say this? Because people (yourself included) espouse this all the time, and yet wouldn't ever dare follow it (and yes, that includes you as well.) This is derived from Marx's labor theory of value, which is that all labor is worth exactly the same, no matter what it is for. So this means that performing brain surgery is worth the same hourly wage as digging a ditch with a pickax. Another interesting property is that Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei is worth far less than Mein Kampf if Marxists applied that theory objectively.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either
...according to some rules you just made up...
I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits
Actually this is pretty easy to do; your effective income just has to be at or below the lowest 35% of income earners, and your net tax burden is less than zero in pretty much every circumstance. If you don't know anybody who has been this way their whole life, then you've only seen and known affluence.
With the true value of anything being the amount, people are willing to pay for it, if you apply the Quakers' approach to pricing, you would not know (or not as well), if the customers want this kind of chair or that, or none at all.
No it'd be easier as the customers would order/pick what would have the most value because they'd get the extra surplus. Trade happens when there's a positive trade value but doesn't say how it's distributed, modern supply and demand theory says this is an adversarial system where the seller tries to gouge the buyer while the buyer tries to get it cheaper through competition. Basically you want the deal to be just barely good enough, so you pocket the most money.
The Quaker philosophy is essentially a honest cost-plus system, I will charge you what it cost me plus a reasonable wage for my time and that's it. There's no incentive to do price discrimination or cut corners or up-sell the customer to a product he doesn't need or any other profit-maximizing trick. If the customer wants a different chair that's better for him but it's the same work for you then it's the same price, there's no incentive to goad the customer into a deal that's better for you and worse for him.
I would assume that fair here is from the seller's perspective, what's fair for an apprentice is not the same as what's fair for a master. If you have to work all night it's fair to ask more than a regular day. But you're doing it from a sense of what's fair compensation for you, not whether the customer has deep pockets or not. It's basically every salary negotiation in any reasonably sized company, is this a fair wage for my skill. Whether the company is making or losing money is not that relevant.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They've pretty much gone away once people actually discussed Free Markets (what they actually are), the actual complexity of economic systems, how businesses game things, inefficiencies inherent in products preventing free market forces from ruling the day, the importance of careful regulation in maintaining free markets, etc. When someone says anything simplistic they usually get spanked for it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
No it still sounds absurd and false. None of that is evidence that a PA governor raised gas taxes by .9 cents in order to not break a promise to not raise the 1 cent. After all it's the wrong decade, it's the wrong government, and it's the wrong motivation - none of it supports the absurd and false claim.
Actualy slavery was considered immoral by many even before that. In the 13th century germany it was considered immoral enough to be put in the law. In 14th century it was abolished by law in france, and that include serfdom. And i pass many other. Where did you get this bullshit about slavery being seen as ok before the 18th ? I am guessing you are taking an US centric view, or you are not well aware that by the 18th century slavery was already in its way to be extinguished.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Standard deduction for single no dependents is $6,350. Give a wage of $26,350 (to make the math simple and readily within the 35 percentile) gives a taxable income of $20,000. Of that, 10% is in the lowest income bracket for $932.50 + 15% for the rest for $204.00, or $1,136.50 Federal income tax. Add 10% State income tax, 3% local income tax, and your mentioned 7.5% Social Security/Medicare, and you've got a tax rate of ~21.6%.
No, they're motivated by greed--because it doesn't take $250,000 to support a family--and the competitiveness of being best--or at least fucking over everyone else they're competing against.
Does it necessarily take 80 hours a week to become rich? No. Does becoming rich necessarily mean being willing to work 80 hours a week? Yes. Unless you've got a shit definition of "rich".
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
Not because it is immoral, because it requires significant capital to invest. Once you have a few million cash you can basically live well forever on just the return from relatively safe investments, with minimal effort.
That was Marx's point. If you own the factory it is relatively easy to sit back and watch the profits roll in while others do the hard labour, and someone without a factory can't just start sewing their own clothes and hope to compete with that. Owning the only means to generate wealth pretty much ensures that no-one else can get wealthy.
It works in practice too, e.g. companies that encourage employees to own stocks so they have a stake in its future.
Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual
That's a vague and unconvincing statement. The children of rich people clearly have a lot more opportunities in life - better education and health, low cost loans from their parents when no sane bank would lend to them etc. Many of them end up failing repeatedly, but they have that family wealth buffer to protect them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It isn't false advertising. Its price is $0.99 if you pay them a dollar they will need to give you a penny back.
Actually in US the part that I hate more isn't the $0.99 but the fact everything is +Tax I much rather know this item will be $1.07 out of my pocket vs $.99 * 1.08 rounded to the next cent. Being that I live near the border of two other states, and a country border. The Tax rate ranges from 5%-8%
If you are going to bother putting price tags where you cannot negotiate the price. We should at least know easily how much we are going to pay for the product.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There is usually a discount for products bought in bulk. The $4.00 12 pack of soda, could sit on the shelf for weeks. vs. buying 4 12 packs at $2.50 will allow 4x the product to go off the self, and allowing putting in more space for the product. Prices on the store products are in essence paying rent for their shelf time. Faster moving products need less rent. Selling in bulk is an easy way on average to lower the length of time per product. Freeing the space to refill.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sorry, but I do not see, how this knowledge changes anything. Suppose, for a second, a genius Quaker invents some new way of making the same chairs faster (or with less wastage of materials). He offers to share the invention, but, as so often happens, other craftsmen are set in their ways... Or, maybe, he can just work much faster — the way Michael Phelps can swim faster — and there is nothing for him to share?
Will it be wrong of him to charge customers the same price that other, less efficient shops have to charge to survive — earning a higher profit? Or will it be wrong of him to undercut those other shops, because of his ingenuity and/or skill? I think, this dilemma alone shows the inherent flaw in the nice-on-the-surface approach... Indeed, because many a man would choose to stick to the old (less efficient) ways of doing things just to avoid this nasty choice, the approach is, in fact, a bad one.
That said, I'm delighted to see the high moderations both of your Christian-themed posts have attained, while the two of mine, which question it, have been penalized :-)
Yes, yes. People of (almost any) Faith are, generally, more pleasant to deal with and have around — as long as they aren't in a position to compel you to follow their rules. The role of America's First Amendment in this regard is often underappreciated...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you do not fit into a neighborhood, you do not fit in. And that means there are all kinds of risks that are hard to calculate when you wander across that bridge. Some of that is police profiling, which can be unsavory at times. But the criminals know that it is harder to have a BS story that will hold up for even 60 seconds when you are not a local.
In terms of a one-off crime, yeah, you probably do better by kicking in the door of a random wealthier domicile. But as a lifestyle, robbing people who are underprotected by the police is "safer", even if you do not get a lot of money for it for an individual crime.