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.
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.
The thing that feels hopeless here is that “dynamic pricing” is like…the natural way to sell stuff if that makes sense? Standardized non-negotiated pricetags evolved as part of the growth of industrialization and mass consumerism. It just wasn’t feasible to have individual salespeople trying to milk each customer out of the most possible money for every transaction for small purchases, and big box stores eliminated the shopkeeper role as a quasi-salesperson who might do that from time to time. But that still IS how many, many sales work today. It’s just that “negotiated prices” are reserved for big ticket items where salespeople get a big enough cut. Real estate, B2B deals, new cars, etc are sold by salespeople whose main job is moneymilking based on what they think they can con the particular buyer into handing over.
Technology, as the great optimizer, is merely making the job of a salesperson automated enough to be applied at the Taco Bell drivethru using your personal data.
You can’t negotiate for your nachos though
Well yeah, your ability to negotiate was always the downside to this system
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?
20-25 years ago it was our default behavior to fake these sorts of things. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten we can lie to computers.
Any place which uses phone numbers, use your local area code plus 867-5309 it works surprisingly often. Jenny probably has a bunch of points at 7/11…
So two thoughts:
Get more comfortable with making these people wait. You want an email to give me a better price? That’s fine it will take me a minute to lookup my email address. It’s actually not that bad once you get used to doing this. I do it religiously now when I’m traveling and it’s never been an issue.
Consider using DuckDuckGo’s email feature. They will quickly generate human-friendly throwaway addresses like “geek-rhino-spoon” at duck dot com. I have the ddg browser on my phone and once you have it set up, it takes just a second to search “ddg email” and first link goes to the page that generates a new address for you. So it’s super quick to do on the fly. When they forward emails to you, there is a banner at the top with a link to deactivate that throwaway address you used should you start getting spam. It’s pretty slick in my experience.
Edit: fixed a typo
Yeah but then I don’t get to make Microsoft spend money…
Ok fair point.
Granted its probably cents and less than a rounding error to them but…
Nah fuck that. I’ll straight up in their face: “Sure mate, you can have my email. Just wait a sec while I spin up a new throw away.” They don’t give a shit if you do that. They’ll get their paycheck either way. Just don’t waste their time longer than necessary, they’ve also got managers breathing diwn their necks.
But what advantage does that have over just having 1 email account which you never check and only receives spam?
The only advantage I can see is maybe in several years it gets enough email that it fills up the free storage and I have to go delete everything twice a decade(being generous) but otherwise???
In Protons Pass App you can create email-aliases on the fly, and if you have a domain you can use it too, which makes it possible to just write an email you want to use down and add it afterwards to your aliases, which is pretty nice (and every mailadress is then available of course) - i’m thinking to get a domain just for that feature since domains are such low cost items.
Yeah…its possible… Or take 30 seconds to make a Hotmail account and slowly let it fill up with spam…