Item — HN Reader

This is what I think of when I think of personalized pricing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlT3uHlNAg&t=111s

It's pretty much what I've done when selling at flea markets all of my life. I ask what I think the market will bear, per person and situation. I don't feel at all guilty for it. It doesn't surprise me at all that mass customization in the information age has brought us to it at scale, or that the force of law would be necessary to repress it.

Some people seem to feel they have a right to the best price without negotiating or shopping. I don't feel that I'm owed or owe that privilege.

4 comments

How do I negotiate with a minimum wage cashier, self-checkout, or a checkout page? Have you ever been in a Kroger property, or Walmart, or any other multi-billion dollar retailer and negotiated on something? Maybe they'll price match and I guess that counts, but it's not as if we have access to data to do that in a meaningful way to compete with the data that they have to act on.

In lieu of suppressing surveillance pricing, I could live with retailers being forced to open source, in real time, all product and sales related data, including historical as far back as they have.

>How do I negotiate with a minimum wage cashier, self-checkout, or a checkout page?

You "negotiate" by switching to a competitor, or in some circumstances refusing to purchase at all. It's a "negotiation" in the same way that participating in an auction is a negotiation.

I'm sure that's the econ 101 answer for healthy, theoretical free markets. In reality, we have market consolidation leading to near monopolies, collusion/price fixing between what few companies remain, etc. Refusing to purchase works for some things maybe, not so much for basic household goods and groceries, an area where a small handful of companies control the overwhelming majority of the market. Allowing survellience pricing just gives these conglomerates more leverage over consumers.

I worry about corner cases like rural towns with only one grocery store (although I suspect that those are already gouging people?) but that isn't San Francisco.

I come from a culture where the price is always listed. If I don't like the price, I'll either find a better deal somewhere else (shop) or not buy. Any time I'm forced to barter with a person I lose, because I do feel guilty about it. I feel bad that you won't get as much money as you think you should, despite the low balance in my bank account.

Some people seem to feel they have a right to help others get ripped off because they're not schemers. I don't feel I owe you that.

How much did you know about the person you were selling to? Did you know what websites they visited or what past purchases they made or what time they went to sleep every night?

It is because you're on the side benefitting from it. It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class.

> It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class

It should absolutely benefit the blue-collar consumer. Whom it hurts is the moderately rich. (If it works as intended.)

I don't think this makes any sense. If this were true, payday loans would be the lowest interest loans, and ghetto grocery stores would have the lowest prices.

The more money you have, the less desperate you are, the longer you can wait to make a purchase, and the more storage space and capital you have to enable you to get the ideal price/unit bulk rate. I don't think surveillance pricing will affect the moderately rich at all. It will only target the poor.

They will know that you have no bread left in the pantry, no car, two children and no other grocery store near you, and you will pay convenience store prices.

edit: Hell, they'll know that you have $10 left, so you can afford it. They'll know you have a history of taking payday loans when desperate, so they'll raise the price even when you can't afford it, and sell your identity to a payday loan company. The payday loan company will pay a bigger premium for you because they know you have a propensity to default.

Like a rideshare app offering worse pay to drivers who they know are heavily in debt and near their payment deadline? Offering less pay to people who are desperate and have no other options?

> Like a rideshare app offering worse pay to drivers who they know are heavily in debt and near their payment deadline?

No. Labour is a famously idiosyncratic market.

Your example is both bad and irrelevant. Two completely unrelated things can be true simultaneously.

I'm not seeing this example as unrelated.

E.g. If a seller knows I've been searching for flu remedies, I've made a social media post related to the illness. Then I go to the pharmacy and everything related to alleviating those symptoms is more expensive for me.

Put simply, if they know you absolutely need something, they will leverage that information.

A larger more powerful organization has leverage over someone by collecting their data, and uses that to extract value from them.

I can’t quite understand your point. My example was a real reported behavior.

its still surveillance pricing - the payment from the working class here is their labour.

its the same exploitation in both cases

Well they also said they don't feel they're owed that privilege so it's probably not that simple.