8 ms·

This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. This type of pricing makes zero sense from a conversions point of view. Don't get m

by axg11 5y ago

This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. This type of pricing makes zero sense from a conversions point of view. Don't get me wrong, every telco in North America is an oligopolistic, stagnant, rent-seeking, anti-consumer pile of crap, but I doubt this is intentional.

rambojazz 5y ago
This thing with these "bugs" is, they always favor the seller. For example they never decrease the price.
- Raicuparta 5y ago
  Bugs that make things ridiculously cheap (or free) happen all the time.
mortenjorck 5y ago
Agreed, though I wonder what the original intent was. My guess is there was still a variable pricing scheme, but probably only varying by $10, with the display code not expecting its value to get saved locally.
phkahler 5y ago
>> This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. Hahahaha. It takes more code to add $10 to a price. It takes a cookie or something to remember how much they quoted you last time. This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug, it's a feature that someone took time to implement. The "feature" might be buggy in the sense that's its too obvious and perhaps was only supposed to increase the price once or something, but the overall implementation is almost certainly not a bug.
- axg11 5y ago
  Do you work in software development? I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    >> Do you work in software development? Yes I do. >> I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this. Those would make a nice blog post. I've done some stupid things and seen some unexpected results, but I've never encountered the likes of this "accidentally" incrementing price thing. ;-)
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      It could be an index error or a misuse of references, where product B is supposes to be product A + 10. It could be that some local taxes or fees comes out to $10, and the client code does `price += taxes` on page load. There could be code to round up to a $10 increment, and then subtract 2 cents so the prices are all $X9.98, but the rounding logic is incorrect. Since this is JS, they will be using floating point prices. That is a minefield in itself. I'm not saying it's definitely a bug. But it trivially could be.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        Why do you need to keep state here? I can see calculating the prices dynamicly, but why save and the reuse the result?
        MiddleEndian 5y ago
        They could be using some node.js framework they don't understand that is silently persisting data.
        dntrkv 5y ago
        Especially if they are using isomorphic JS. Globals / singletons are very dangerous when the JS runs on both the server and client.
        jonny_eh 5y ago
        Caching.
- tempoponet 5y ago
  It could be as simple as pulling locally cached price data, saying this one is $10 more than the one below it, and then caching that. It would raise the price of itself if they used the wrong array index - something every programmer has done.
  - thayne 5y ago
    But why would you cache price data like that?
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > But why would you No idea if GP is correct, but that would not even be close to the weirdest thing I've seen in production code in companies. Very plausible to me that an engineer for a large company could write code like that. Short answer, corporate codebases are messy and weird, and because they are already messy and weird they are therefore breeding ground for even more baffling decisions based on time constraints and partial understandings of already weird systems. Especially in legacy systems, questionable, weird design choices keep producing other questionable, weird design choices until explaining why AJAX requests are getting parsed through hidden input fields or why all of the localstorage fields are Base64 encoded suddenly requires a multi-part, 5-10 minute story about the history of the codebase -- and that's if you're lucky enough to have anyone around who knows the story in the first place. Related to the above, if you're in charge of an engineering team at a company please build more time into your team's schedule for refactoring and code cleanup. ---- To jump off of OP's (at the top of the thread) point, it could also be a bug with malicious pricing. A programmer might have tried to build a dynamic pricing system based on geographic area or whatever and just accidentally read the base price from the same cache they're writing to. And if your followup question is "but why would you read the base price from localstorage instead of from the server, or why would you even have that logic clientside in the first place?" -- then see the first point above. But none of the explanations here would be surprising to me at all. It's not really a debate about whether AT&T alters prices based on stuff like area and customer data, I'd be surprised if someone tried to claim they don't. But like OP said, this doesn't make much sense from a conversions point of view; and it's way more likely to be a bug than it is to be an executive mistakenly believing that raising the price by $10 on every refresh makes people more likely to buy Internet. That executive already has better methods to increase prices: adding hidden fees and service charges, and raising prices behind the backs of long-term customers who aren't checking their bills regularly enough or who are unlikely to go to the trouble and inconvenience of switching or fighting the bill. My suspicion is bug.
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
  - phkahler 5y ago
    >> You obviously don’t code. over 40 years if you count my kid years and closing in on 30 on the clock. IMHO anyone that thinks "the price magically increments 10 dollars every page refresh" is somehow a typical bug (that made production yet!) should probably quit the field.
    - pwinnski 5y ago
      So I've been coding a few more years than you have, but not many. As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all. Having spent a few years with companies using things like Angular and React, I've seen bugs of this type / in this category more than once. Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things, but this is the norm more often than not.
      - phkahler 5y ago
        >> Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things... Will do. ... but this is the norm more often than not. I can't tell you how frightening I find that ;-) I did appreciate your comment: >> As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all. That affirms my idea that such things should never happen - at least in some contexts. But it leave me wondering what on earth kind of tools are people using for this to be unsurprising?
        jl6 5y ago
        > such things should never happen The space where things should never happen is fertile ground for bugs, because by definition programmers pay less attention / do less testing when they think failure is impossible :)
    - mechanical_bear 5y ago
      I retract my assertion then. However, there were several possible scenarios proffered in the comments whereby this is an easy bug to create. Mainly an increment setup where it increments itself instead of increments off of a base.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  > This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug Um, I know you said you work in software, and the rules say not to doubt you. So I'll press Y and move on. There are so many levels of bugs that almost nothing would surprise me, and this falls very easily within the range of bugs I've witnessed personally. Let's try this: Hahahaha. It takes a single off-by-one errors to accidentally increment prices. It would take a lot of effort to deliberate design a feature that deliberately adds to quoted prices on every refresh, for the purpose of... um... well, that part is unclear. This bug can NOT be explicitly programmed behavior, it's too obvious incorrect behavior to be something someone took time to implement. Yeah, that was easy. Except mine makes sense.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    They may have never coded a pricing system. I haven’t, but I’ve coded trading systems. Typo a dividend or convert and your dumb little bot starts incrementing its offer every millisecond. (The fun is when another bot gets thrown into a complementary loop and the exchange yells at you.) Have a system that e.g. codes a local tax or maintenance allowance run on lookup, or have these data in two systems that try to sync but do it wrong, and you get something like this. (This is not a legitimate pricing strategy. Nobody gets FOMO buying an AT&T plan.)
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    I think OP was saying that the price being relative to each user/session is not a bug, but a feature. The bug part is probably that it keeps raising the price on every refresh, rather than just once.
reaperducer 5y ago
This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing Color me skeptical. I built web sites for a mid-sized B2B and B2C company, and had to build all kinds of games into the pricing. Refreshed the page more than three times? That's a price change. Returned to the same page 24 hours later? 36 hours later? 72 hours later? Price change. Price change. Price change. Using a tablet? Price change. Connecting from an IP address believed to be in a particular geographic region? Price change, and inventory change. An unintended side effect of all of this was that it gave the illusion that pricing was dynamic based on supply and demand. It wasn't. There was no link between inventory and pricing. It was all games based on the user.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  How can users play this game to their favor?
  - jawilson2 5y ago
    VPN and browser spoofing?
    - hunter2_ 5y ago
      Would be interesting to scrape large swaths of the web and calculate the average differences in price based on user agent string (it's well established that Apple users occasionally see higher prices, but I don't know about Windows vs Linux for example), other fingerprinting, ISP / IP geo, and so forth. Does this exist? Taking it a step further: a browser extension that tries several scenarios (like Honey, but just for re-fingerprinting and stuff... can an extension make a request that suppresses/manipulates cookies only temporarily?) as you're shopping.
  - staindk 5y ago
    Save the most money by visiting these types of sites 0 times
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
dtech 5y ago
It makes a lot of sense. People returning to your pricing page are more likely to have decided to buy from you, so they're likely less price sensitive. I've seen it myself. Not in $10 increments every refresh though, that's most likely badly coded.
- silisili 5y ago
  I see this argument but wonder how true it is. If I'm shopping around, I'm already being fickle, comparing prices, features, etc. $10 would probably often be a breaking point. And me finding out you did this definitely would. If anything, it seems one should slightly -lower- prices when suspecting a customer is shopping around.
starwind 5y ago
yeah nearly every time they refresh you see a red box exclamation point and "Heads up.." in the top right
SubiculumCode 5y ago
The more you keep coming back the more interested you are. I've long suspected this, and even experienced it before on Amazon, I'm almost certain.
- lupire 5y ago
  That's when you lower the price to deal the deal, not scare them off.
  - jimmydorry 5y ago
    Except when you are operating in a niche with no competitors...
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    If they keep coming back its because they either can't find it somewhere else, don't want to bother with an unknown store,etc
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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janmarsal 5y ago
Very common bug actually. I've noticed it on most of the airline and traveling agency websites. Must be those sloppy programmers. I know I'm always extra careless when I have to program something where real money is moving.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
>> but I doubt this is intentional. And I doubt that these quoted prices have any relation to the actual bill that they will eventually send.
- sixothree 5y ago
  I have a habit of asking what the exact price of my bill will be after taxes and fees. It is _rarely_ what the sales person quotes. I have cancelled service because of the difference in quoted price vs bill price. But at least once in the last 5 years it was exact to the penny. So there's that.
  - bubblethink 5y ago
    At least with comcast, if you get just internet and buy your modem, the actual price is the same. If you bundle TV, all hell breaks lose because with TV, there can be any number of fees (broadcast, license, content, HD, technology, anything imaginable under the sun). If they threw in a nuclear fusion fee, people wouldn't even notice.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    I used to work at att, I had 0 ability to tell you what your actual bill would be, more like a +-10$ estimate. Often times people's bills would slightly change every month by a buck or two up and down, no idea why.
    - sixothree 5y ago
      I left directv because of this some years ago. Every month the bill was just slightly different. The person who called me begging me to come back insisted that wasn't true. lol
      - thatguy0900 5y ago
        Literally nothing in any of our documentation mentioned it all, and it wasn't everyone. Always just makes as generic things like fees. They were lying or new
JaimeThompson 5y ago
>makes zero sense That could be the AT&T motto. See most everything they have done in the past 15 years.

by axg11 5y ago

rambojazz 5y ago

This thing with these "bugs" is, they always favor the seller. For example they never decrease the price.

Raicuparta 5y ago
Bugs that make things ridiculously cheap (or free) happen all the time.

mortenjorck 5y ago

Agreed, though I wonder what the original intent was. My guess is there was still a variable pricing scheme, but probably only varying by $10, with the display code not expecting its value to get saved locally.

phkahler 5y ago

>> This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. Hahahaha. It takes more code to add $10 to a price. It takes a cookie or something to remember how much they quoted you last time. This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug, it's a feature that someone took time to implement. The "feature" might be buggy in the sense that's its too obvious and perhaps was only supposed to increase the price once or something, but the overall implementation is almost certainly not a bug.

axg11 5y ago
Do you work in software development? I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> Do you work in software development? Yes I do. >> I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this. Those would make a nice blog post. I've done some stupid things and seen some unexpected results, but I've never encountered the likes of this "accidentally" incrementing price thing. ;-)
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    It could be an index error or a misuse of references, where product B is supposes to be product A + 10. It could be that some local taxes or fees comes out to $10, and the client code does `price += taxes` on page load. There could be code to round up to a $10 increment, and then subtract 2 cents so the prices are all $X9.98, but the rounding logic is incorrect. Since this is JS, they will be using floating point prices. That is a minefield in itself. I'm not saying it's definitely a bug. But it trivially could be.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      Why do you need to keep state here? I can see calculating the prices dynamicly, but why save and the reuse the result?
      - MiddleEndian 5y ago
        They could be using some node.js framework they don't understand that is silently persisting data.
        dntrkv 5y ago
        Especially if they are using isomorphic JS. Globals / singletons are very dangerous when the JS runs on both the server and client.
      - jonny_eh 5y ago
        Caching.
tempoponet 5y ago
It could be as simple as pulling locally cached price data, saying this one is $10 more than the one below it, and then caching that. It would raise the price of itself if they used the wrong array index - something every programmer has done.
- thayne 5y ago
  But why would you cache price data like that?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > But why would you No idea if GP is correct, but that would not even be close to the weirdest thing I've seen in production code in companies. Very plausible to me that an engineer for a large company could write code like that. Short answer, corporate codebases are messy and weird, and because they are already messy and weird they are therefore breeding ground for even more baffling decisions based on time constraints and partial understandings of already weird systems. Especially in legacy systems, questionable, weird design choices keep producing other questionable, weird design choices until explaining why AJAX requests are getting parsed through hidden input fields or why all of the localstorage fields are Base64 encoded suddenly requires a multi-part, 5-10 minute story about the history of the codebase -- and that's if you're lucky enough to have anyone around who knows the story in the first place. Related to the above, if you're in charge of an engineering team at a company please build more time into your team's schedule for refactoring and code cleanup. ---- To jump off of OP's (at the top of the thread) point, it could also be a bug with malicious pricing. A programmer might have tried to build a dynamic pricing system based on geographic area or whatever and just accidentally read the base price from the same cache they're writing to. And if your followup question is "but why would you read the base price from localstorage instead of from the server, or why would you even have that logic clientside in the first place?" -- then see the first point above. But none of the explanations here would be surprising to me at all. It's not really a debate about whether AT&T alters prices based on stuff like area and customer data, I'd be surprised if someone tried to claim they don't. But like OP said, this doesn't make much sense from a conversions point of view; and it's way more likely to be a bug than it is to be an executive mistakenly believing that raising the price by $10 on every refresh makes people more likely to buy Internet. That executive already has better methods to increase prices: adding hidden fees and service charges, and raising prices behind the backs of long-term customers who aren't checking their bills regularly enough or who are unlikely to go to the trouble and inconvenience of switching or fighting the bill. My suspicion is bug.
mechanical_bear 5y ago
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> You obviously don’t code. over 40 years if you count my kid years and closing in on 30 on the clock. IMHO anyone that thinks "the price magically increments 10 dollars every page refresh" is somehow a typical bug (that made production yet!) should probably quit the field.
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    So I've been coding a few more years than you have, but not many. As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all. Having spent a few years with companies using things like Angular and React, I've seen bugs of this type / in this category more than once. Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things, but this is the norm more often than not.
    - phkahler 5y ago
      >> Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things... Will do. ... but this is the norm more often than not. I can't tell you how frightening I find that ;-) I did appreciate your comment: >> As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all. That affirms my idea that such things should never happen - at least in some contexts. But it leave me wondering what on earth kind of tools are people using for this to be unsurprising?
      - jl6 5y ago
        > such things should never happen The space where things should never happen is fertile ground for bugs, because by definition programmers pay less attention / do less testing when they think failure is impossible :)
  - mechanical_bear 5y ago
    I retract my assertion then. However, there were several possible scenarios proffered in the comments whereby this is an easy bug to create. Mainly an increment setup where it increments itself instead of increments off of a base.
pwinnski 5y ago
> This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug Um, I know you said you work in software, and the rules say not to doubt you. So I'll press Y and move on. There are so many levels of bugs that almost nothing would surprise me, and this falls very easily within the range of bugs I've witnessed personally. Let's try this: Hahahaha. It takes a single off-by-one errors to accidentally increment prices. It would take a lot of effort to deliberate design a feature that deliberately adds to quoted prices on every refresh, for the purpose of... um... well, that part is unclear. This bug can NOT be explicitly programmed behavior, it's too obvious incorrect behavior to be something someone took time to implement. Yeah, that was easy. Except mine makes sense.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  They may have never coded a pricing system. I haven’t, but I’ve coded trading systems. Typo a dividend or convert and your dumb little bot starts incrementing its offer every millisecond. (The fun is when another bot gets thrown into a complementary loop and the exchange yells at you.) Have a system that e.g. codes a local tax or maintenance allowance run on lookup, or have these data in two systems that try to sync but do it wrong, and you get something like this. (This is not a legitimate pricing strategy. Nobody gets FOMO buying an AT&T plan.)
- jklinger410 5y ago
  I think OP was saying that the price being relative to each user/session is not a bug, but a feature. The bug part is probably that it keeps raising the price on every refresh, rather than just once.

reaperducer 5y ago

This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing Color me skeptical. I built web sites for a mid-sized B2B and B2C company, and had to build all kinds of games into the pricing. Refreshed the page more than three times? That's a price change. Returned to the same page 24 hours later? 36 hours later? 72 hours later? Price change. Price change. Price change. Using a tablet? Price change. Connecting from an IP address believed to be in a particular geographic region? Price change, and inventory change. An unintended side effect of all of this was that it gave the illusion that pricing was dynamic based on supply and demand. It wasn't. There was no link between inventory and pricing. It was all games based on the user.

mywittyname 5y ago
How can users play this game to their favor?
- jawilson2 5y ago
  VPN and browser spoofing?
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    Would be interesting to scrape large swaths of the web and calculate the average differences in price based on user agent string (it's well established that Apple users occasionally see higher prices, but I don't know about Windows vs Linux for example), other fingerprinting, ISP / IP geo, and so forth. Does this exist? Taking it a step further: a browser extension that tries several scenarios (like Honey, but just for re-fingerprinting and stuff... can an extension make a request that suppresses/manipulates cookies only temporarily?) as you're shopping.
- staindk 5y ago
  Save the most money by visiting these types of sites 0 times
mechanical_bear 5y ago

dtech 5y ago

It makes a lot of sense. People returning to your pricing page are more likely to have decided to buy from you, so they're likely less price sensitive. I've seen it myself. Not in $10 increments every refresh though, that's most likely badly coded.

silisili 5y ago
I see this argument but wonder how true it is. If I'm shopping around, I'm already being fickle, comparing prices, features, etc. $10 would probably often be a breaking point. And me finding out you did this definitely would. If anything, it seems one should slightly -lower- prices when suspecting a customer is shopping around.

starwind 5y ago

yeah nearly every time they refresh you see a red box exclamation point and "Heads up.." in the top right

SubiculumCode 5y ago

The more you keep coming back the more interested you are. I've long suspected this, and even experienced it before on Amazon, I'm almost certain.

lupire 5y ago
That's when you lower the price to deal the deal, not scare them off.
- jimmydorry 5y ago
  Except when you are operating in a niche with no competitors...
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  If they keep coming back its because they either can't find it somewhere else, don't want to bother with an unknown store,etc

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

janmarsal 5y ago

Very common bug actually. I've noticed it on most of the airline and traveling agency websites. Must be those sloppy programmers. I know I'm always extra careless when I have to program something where real money is moving.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 5y ago

>> but I doubt this is intentional. And I doubt that these quoted prices have any relation to the actual bill that they will eventually send.

sixothree 5y ago
I have a habit of asking what the exact price of my bill will be after taxes and fees. It is _rarely_ what the sales person quotes. I have cancelled service because of the difference in quoted price vs bill price. But at least once in the last 5 years it was exact to the penny. So there's that.
- bubblethink 5y ago
  At least with comcast, if you get just internet and buy your modem, the actual price is the same. If you bundle TV, all hell breaks lose because with TV, there can be any number of fees (broadcast, license, content, HD, technology, anything imaginable under the sun). If they threw in a nuclear fusion fee, people wouldn't even notice.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  I used to work at att, I had 0 ability to tell you what your actual bill would be, more like a +-10$ estimate. Often times people's bills would slightly change every month by a buck or two up and down, no idea why.
  - sixothree 5y ago
    I left directv because of this some years ago. Every month the bill was just slightly different. The person who called me begging me to come back insisted that wasn't true. lol
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      Literally nothing in any of our documentation mentioned it all, and it wasn't everyone. Always just makes as generic things like fees. They were lying or new

JaimeThompson 5y ago

>makes zero sense That could be the AT&T motto. See most everything they have done in the past 15 years.