> If you still think it shouldn't count, then what's the rationale that sets it apart? There's no discrimination involved. "Rich people pay more" is a pricing

> If you still think it shouldn't count, then what's the rationale that sets it apart? There's no discrimination involved. "Rich people pay more" is a pricing difference based on the identity of the customer. "Buy 300, get 100 free" is open to anyone. Take the textbook example of what makes price discrimination difficult: the ability of rich people to use purchasing agents. At Bakery "Soak The Rich", that would be a desirable approach - you ask someone to buy your bread for you, they pay a low price, and then they turn the bread over to you. At Bakery "Ask About Our Bulk Discounts", that approach would make no sense. The other notable thing about bulk discounts is that they represent charging lower prices to customers with higher willingness to pay. > It is literally a textbook example of price discrimination I've confirmed that you're right about this. But the economics of bulk discounts are radically different from other forms of price discrimination, so all I can really say here is that they should be treated separately. Principles of Economics says that "Quantity discounts are often a successful way to price discriminate because customers' willingness to pay for an additional unit declines as they buy more units", but this analysis has some flaws, most notably that bulk discounts do not take any account of how many units a customer already owns. The book also notes that price discrimination cannot exist in a competitive market, which conflicts with the idea that bulk discounts are an example of price discrimination. This is because of the logistical differences you mention - while they don't necessarily exist everywhere, they do exist in most transactions (including with digital goods, where payment processing fees mean that selling 1 item 100 times is far more expensive than selling 100 items at once), and they can easily sustain bulk discounts in a competitive market. > Even from a cynical perspective, that is incomplete, since it doesn't capture another purpose--which you mentioned in passing--of "better a little profit than no profit", where a lower price is offered to permit trades that would otherwise not occur. But it's not incomplete. As I mentioned above, the lower price is still intended to allow for zero consumer surplus. The trade that occurs under the system of price discrimination, when it wouldn't have occurred without it, benefits the customer to only a negligible degree, and this is by design.