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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance".
But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. There seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that price discrimination reduces consumer surplus on average. But I've never seen a convincing argument to that effect.
For example: Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.) But if that were banned, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lower prices for everyone. That would destroy almost all their revenue which comes from high prices in rich countries. Instead, they'd charge rich-country prices to everyone, and most people in poor countries would simply have to go without. That seems like it would be pure harm.
It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument?
This seems entirely reasonable - they're obviously a point where tax rates are too low and revenue isn't being brought in, but also a point where tax rates are too high, incentivizing tax shelters or outright crime, and revenue starts decreasing again. The price discrimination side is the same thing just on "optional" purchases instead of taxes so it makes sense there is some Laffer curve corollary.
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.
It should absolutely benefit the blue-collar consumer. Whom it hurts is the moderately rich. (If it works as intended.)
In the end, what's the difference?
Surveillance pricing defenders claim that surveillance pricing is better because it works both ways--it might offer a higher price to someone who is desperate, but someone who is likely not that motivated might get a sweet deal. I highly doubt that. A highly-advertised, transparent discount or sale is how you sell to someone who is not that motivated. Surveillance pricing is how you (secretly) extract as much money as possible from the desperate.
And they're subsidized by the revenue made by everyone else. A thousands of coupons start rolling in and meaningfully affecting revenue either the coupons go away or the MSRP increases. It's the exact same pig just slightly different lipstick.
For me, it's the surveillance infrastructure per se. My main curiosity around these bills is to what extent surveillance pricing–versus ad targeting–drives the economics of those systems. (My prior is not much.)
Most stores and restaurant chains had normal prices, and sale/special prices. You could coupon like mad and save some serious money by going around to a bunch of different places, with them probably losing money on many of those transactions as long as you were disciplined and didn't buy non-couponed items, but it was a ton of work.
(Another model was to have had fake, way-too-high [like, double what they should be] full prices, but 2/3 of those kinds of stores were always "on sale" at what should be the normal price anyway. A disgusting psychological trick and tacit lie that we probably should have found some way to effectively crack down on, but pretty easy to spot and it was no big deal to avoid the places that did this, especially since most of them sold crappy goods anyway. This model's still around, I'm just not really concerned with it here and mentioning it as an aside to acknowledge that it existed, and exists)
Now we have this model:
A very-few stores and restaurant chains still follow the old model, but most now have batshit crazy "normal" prices, require an app (so, spying) and shopping specials to get what should be the normal prices, and then sometimes you do still get an actual bargain.
The net result is that if you just want reasonable fucking baseline prices and not to be gouged, you now have to spend more time and attention than before.
I'm convinced this is a big part of why there's a perception that inflation is even worse than official measurements say it is. I can say it's a major contributing factor to it feeling like our financial situation is worse than it was six years ago, despite making quite a bit more money now. We were finally at a point where we didn't really need to pay attention to sales and such at most normal stores, just didn't matter enough to us to save an extra couple bucks and we could finally relax a little when shopping, like pay attention to which interchangeable thing was cheaper and maybe grab things if we saw a sale but we didn't need to structure our grocery lists around deals. Now? They've price-discriminated via attention and allowing-tracking (those damn apps) so much that we have to pay lots of attention and have their damn advertising prodding us all the time (the apps) again just to not get entirely screwed every time we go to a store. We feel poorer again.
In short, I think a somewhat-obscure online rant-song about Taco Bell contains more insight about how normal people are experiencing the US economy since Covid, than most serious economic reporting does.
Lyrics:
https://genius.com/Jeff-heiny-deserving-taco-bell-rant-lyric...
Song, such as it is (warning: lo-fi screamo, more or less):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g0coPaZWi4