Tiered pricing is EVERYWHERE now. In supermarkets, if you don’t have their app/loyalty card you have to pay higher prices. They frame it as a “discount” or “savings” for having the app, but clearly it’s just a punishment for not giving them your info and allowing them to track/advertise at you.
In restaurants/fast food places, you get “discounts” (i.e. regular prices) via the app/email list, and if you don’t have the app or give them your email address you don’t get the discount (read: you have to pay higher prices). And of course they can “tailor” personalised “deals” directly at you based on your past behaviour to optimise how much money they get out of you.
I just looked at a hotel and they’re advertising a “discount” if you give them your email address (read: a higher price if you don’t allow them to advertise at you).
I absolutely hate this behaviour. I know exactly why it’s there: some people are willing to pay more for convenience/no ads, and some are willing to go to more effort / put up with ads for a lower price. Either way they get more money out of you: the logical conclusion of capitalism and chasing higher profits.
It feels like this should be illegal. It feels like a cousin of price gouging, which is already illegal. Ofc it never will be outlawed in america - idk how much this happens across the pond though - but I hope one day this could be outlawed in europe.
No
Make it illegal, everyone just pays the higher price, not the lower one. Is that fine too?
That’s not how market forces work, at all.
How do they work?
I can’t stand it either. At least in most cases you can give a throwaway email to get the better pricing. It’s kind of the devil you know at this point.
Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, is true evil as I see it. Adjusting prices on the fly to suit whatever arbitrary condition is set by corporate jerkoffs…it’s price gouging in real time.
I’ve been considering just making a spam email vs my regular email. I know there are “temporary” email services but they don’t always apply. For example you are at a store and the say “you get a 5% if you give your email” and you want to use one of those one time emails what are you supposed to do? Stand there, take out your phone, “one sec, let me just spin up a email address to give you”.
Thinking of just creating a email account on say hotmail(just for the lols) and direct everything likely to spam me there. There is the argument “they will still track you and sell your data to advertisers who will send spam to that account”. Yeah but 1.why do I care if I never check the account? 2. If I use Hotmail all it will do is cause increase cost to Microsoft so double win?
Somehow I feel ok with tiered pricing when it isn’t targetted/personalised. Most barbers have a lower price for children and for over-65’s, which I’m fine with. And I have no problem with student pricing, or some places which offer a discount to nhs or army staff. Those make sense to me and I have no problem with them.
But those feel distinct from “fuck you, get our app or give us your email address and your phone number, or else we will charge you more”, which is now how a lot of places seem to work, and most people just don’t seem to care and happily download a thousand apps and sign up for a thousand mailing lists to get 5% off.
Am I wrong? Is there a counterargument, or is this just how business works now? This is IRL enshittification. Do you agree?
Or they don’t care and just pay 30% more. Encouraging every other place to pull the same scam.
You’re right. I wish there was a way to stamp it out.
We need BugMeNot for membership systems.
I like to take them up on their offer and give them a temporary email, the address to the local cemetery and the initials of my childhood bully or some random two letter combo if I’m feeling pithy.
Yes, price discrimination is discrimination and should be illegal.
I don’t think it’s wrong for shops to offer a simple, optional reward program (spend x amount, get y discount) as an incentive to shop there. Often you can enter a fake name and temporary email address or email alias (simplelogin.io has a free plan for aliases).
It’s excessive data collection for targeting advertising, the push to install apps, and dynamic pricing which I strongly oppose, especially when there is a lack of transparency surrounding it.
In my opinion dynamic pricing is the worst thing that any company can provide. I imagine it’s only going to get more popular in the future considering how much data is available now, too.
It starts that way. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Instead of straight discounts they have started with bonus missions where you have to buy x amount of this certain brand to get 1 more for free and stuff and it’s just maniacal
It’s just another thing which will enshittyfy with time
Even data collection from a grocery store isn’t inherently problematic. With all the perishables they have it helps plan inventory if they have more data.
Yes, analytics aren’t inherently bad. They can be helpful in planning inventory and improving services like you said, but that can be accomplished with anonymized data.
The problems arise when more data is collected than is necessary to make helpful business decisions, when highly specific individual profiles and digital footprints are created, and when the data is shared with third parties who can use it for purposes other than the ones listed by who you first gave them to.
I pay for an email alias service, every service gets a unique email which I can disable or delete when they start spamming.
Yeah, I do that too either with Firefox Relay or 10minutemail. But I kinda object to the principle. It’s not that I can’t get around their tracking, it’s that I have to acquiesce to their system to even partake in their business.
I think you mean their should be regulation enforcing price transparency in more instances
Tiered pricing makes perfect sense in certain contexts:
Yes, I’ll pay for shipping every 6 months instead of paying for Amazon Prime. No, Papa John’s, charging 5 bucks to have your pizza jump to the top of the make line isn’t a good idea (idk if they still do this, it was always store by store and the employees just ignored it anyway)
papa johns, secret racism, secret fascists.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a grocery store where, when asked if I had the loyalty card and I said no, they didn’t just scan their own thereby giving me the discounted prices.
I like how OP points out a cultural issue, and everyone in the comments explains how to use the loophole.
If you need a loophole to deal with some bullshit, you’re part of the problem.
I’m ok with rich people getting charged more. But anyone who isn’t making like $1 million/year should get the normal price.
I don’t like it and its a fair part of why I shop in Aldi instead, they don’t do it.
yet
In supermarkets, if you don’t have their app/loyalty card you have to pay higher prices. They frame it as a “discount” or “savings” for having the app, but clearly it’s just a punishment for not giving them your info and allowing them to track/advertise at you.
Actually, I’m happy about that particular instance, since I don’t like being tracked, and grocery stores are one of the few businesses that generally provide the option to choose whether I want to sell my data. A number of companies don’t have the option to have a privacy-friendly option. If you want to do business with them, they’re gonna sell your data.
Like, say Google had a “no log, no profile” premium option for YouTube — I’d probably get that, since there’s lots of interesting content on YouTube, and it’s hard to make an alternative… But the only option they provide is data-mining. You can buy your way out of the ads, but that’s all they have on offer.
I’d rather just pay for the goods and services I buy with money, all traditional-like, rather than with my data and privacy.
