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Here is why I think these kinds of dynamic pricing practices are bad: it may be perfectly fair and legal, but it forces a non-negligible number of humanity to w

by stmw 1y ago

Here is why I think these kinds of dynamic pricing practices are bad: it may be perfectly fair and legal, but it forces a non-negligible number of humanity to waste time and/or energy to figure out if it's happening, how to work around it if it is, and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity.

NegativeLatency 1y ago
Especially when your industry is so "critical" that it has repeatedly received bailouts from the government.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  Are you referring to bailouts for airline operators or Boeing?
  - brian_herman 1y ago
    Both
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      Boeing is, for better or worse, pretty critical to our military. I'm not sure why they'd consider any one airline company critical though.
      - stackskipton 1y ago
        Because most airlines have become monopolies at their respective hubs so their loss would severely inconvenience a ton of people so government is encouraged to prop them up. For example, if Delta went under, Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City would lose a total of 50%+ of their flights. That would be absolutely devastating.
        _heimdall 1y ago
        Devastating to individuals sure. I hold a pretty high bar when it comes to something being truly critical enough for the government to bailout, economic concerns never meet that bar for me. If we allowed markets to become monopolized we have to deal with that when the bill comes due rather than kick the can down the road.
        SoftTalker 1y ago
        If Delta went under another carrier would buy their planes and gate access at those airports, it might be chaotic for a short time but if there is enough demand to fly from point A to point B someone will provide the flights.
        JoshTriplett 1y ago
        If Delta went under, one or more airlines would rapidly go "hey, there's a proven demand that's suddenly unmet", and there would very quickly be replacement flights.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    We can debate seat pitch I guess but economy seating hasn't been great for decades and something like United Polaris is better than Pan Am first class ever was even if food is arguably a downgrade.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Airfares were much more expensive when the government regulated them.
  - singleshot_ 1y ago
    You get what you pay for.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Not with price controls.
    - devilbunny 1y ago
      In the US, government-regulated fares meant that fares were basically static on a given route. The only way to bring passengers to your airline was to serve places nobody else did, or to offer extras that slightly offset your profit in the hope that you'd get more, regular customers. Since air travel was substantially more expensive then than now, the amenities gravitated to what attracted the most frequent fliers: businessmen. So stewardesses (they certainly weren't called flight attendants then) had weight limits, age limits, and if-you're-married-you-must-quit deals, and as a glance at some 1970s uniforms will show you, they were basically hiring models who happened to have the right skill set (usually at least one would be a trained nurse, and they all had to be reasonably confident) to dress them in revealing outfits. Like Hooters for travel. If that's what you want, great. If you'd prefer other amenities... maybe not. It has never struck me as coincidental that smoking was banned on US aircraft before no-smoking policies became nigh-universal at restaurants, but in just about the right timeframe for airplanes to shift from a boys' club to a place that catered to families. If you want to pay more to get more, there are a lot of options, starting with coach plus (coach seats, business class legroom, priority boarding) and going through first class before branching out into niches like all-first-class flights (JSX is an airline in the US for which this is the business model; they fly smaller regional-size planes, and the reduced capacity legally allows them to skip the whole TSA and terminal experience and just let you on the plane if you show up and buy a ticket twenty minutes before departure) and then on into the various levels of chartered and truly private aviation. You do, definitely, get what you pay for, but sometimes you don't need a Michelin-starred meal experience. And when that's the case, you've got cheaper options that didn't exist before deregulation (except for Southwest, which avoided problems by not making interstate flights at all in the early days.
akudha 1y ago
Also, just because something is legal, doesn’t make it ethical, moral or fair. It is just that, legal
yadaeno 1y ago
Same with points systems. Why am I forced to understand your made up currency and status system to get the full value of my money. There might be some benefits to price discrimination (which is in effect what a point systems achieves) but the collective time wasted dicking around with points isn’t worth it. Make all point systems illegal.
- b112 1y ago
  The entire point behind reward cards, is to track every purchase you make. They're the original evil tracking device, so the airline makes money with those points. They do it by selling data, by points expiring, and by often only allowing points when seats would be empty otherwise. And often retailers pay more at POS terminals! This all ties into any rewards program. It's part of the package, even if points are granted for use.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    > And often retailers pay more at POS terminals! This is really the whole point. The sale of data is much less lucrative than the purchases by the customers themselves, especially for the "nicer" cards. If you are a CC company with wealthy clientele, they tend to spend more. This means that retailers are willing to offer deals/rewards to attract those clients, and also that you want to offer rewards to keep those clients. This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away It’s more a sunk cost/commitment thing. Their approvals department keeps away low and inconsistent spenders.
    - arcticbull 1y ago
      > This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more. At the high end it actually diminishes. Rewards cards targeting middle of the distribution are more lucrative, generally. Citi Double Cash gets you 2% cash back on purchases whereas the Amex Platinum gets you 1X on all spend worth at most 1.25% (and 5X on airfare).
sciencesama 1y ago
And groceries are planning a similar strategy!!
listenallyall 1y ago
Flights are definitely not a "simple commodity"
- listenallyall 1y ago
  Lol, downvotes. One flight will get you to your sister's wedding on time. The other won't. They don't have equivalent value, they can't be freely exchanged.
fallingknife 1y ago
Airline ticket prices are flat since 2000, which is down almost 50% after inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETG01 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETG01. So I say let them keep doing what they're doing.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Is that accounting for things like bag fees and “fuel surcharges” that used to be in the ticket price?
  - ghaff 1y ago
    People who fly any amount don't pay for checked bags if they check anything at all.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      People pay billions in bag fees alone every year. https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/us-airlines-highest-baggage-fees/ https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/us-airlines-highe... It’s hardly the only fee, either.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        Which doesn't contradict what I wrote. I daresay a lot of families who travel once a year at Christmas pay bag fees for their big bags. Lots of people who travel on a regular basis don't. And a lot of it seems to be on discount airlines. (Which I admittedly never fly.)
        amrocha 1y ago
        It actually literally contradicts what you said. People flying any amount (at christmas with their family) are paying bag fees.
        1y ago
twoodfin 1y ago
Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme? Simply decide if the ticket is worth the money to you. You typically have other airlines to compare to, other fares on the same airline for different itineraries, and other modes of transit entirely. Just because some people won’t buy anything that isn’t on a coupon doesn’t mean coupons are bad.
- alaxhn 1y ago
  > Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme? Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    Again, not seeing the “forcing” in that choice of time and effort.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      The thing you're being forced to do is to choose between paying the higher price without screwing around and screwing around in order to pay the lower price, because the option to pay the lower price without screwing around was taken away. This can be true even if the lower price is nominally a discount. Before everybody would pay $100. Now you can pay $80 by screwing around but have to pay $150 otherwise, and the screwing around is $40 worth of inconvenience. $40 is less than the $70 difference between $80 and $150, but $80 plus a $40 inconvenience is a higher cost than the original $100 uniform price, and obviously so is $150.
- threeseed 1y ago
  Because lack of transparency in pricing affects competition. Which is bad for consumers and the broader economy.
- wapeoifjaweofji 1y ago
  Many basic financial assumptions regarding the free market are premised on the fact that you can figure out the lowest price a vendor is willing to charge for a good and compare that with how much you're willing to pay for it. Obfuscating this is bad for consumers.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 1y ago
You can pretty easily get a good airline price by following a few best practices. If you are a person who wants the best deal, you grind for it. It’s no different than clipping coupons or waiting till closing time to get pastries at a discount.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Either the DOT or FTC should require that all airlines charge the same price for the same class of service on the same flight. Allowing this to continue is just a normalized, predatory, dishonest, unethical scam under the guise of "capitalism".
krick 1y ago
Uh… It's not that you are wrong, but then you can also just abbreviate it to "capitalism is bad, because <…> it forces a non-negligible number of humanity [like all of it] to waste time and/or energy <…> and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity" I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)

by stmw 1y ago

NegativeLatency 1y ago

Especially when your industry is so "critical" that it has repeatedly received bailouts from the government.

_heimdall 1y ago
Are you referring to bailouts for airline operators or Boeing?
- brian_herman 1y ago
  Both
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    Boeing is, for better or worse, pretty critical to our military. I'm not sure why they'd consider any one airline company critical though.
    - stackskipton 1y ago
      Because most airlines have become monopolies at their respective hubs so their loss would severely inconvenience a ton of people so government is encouraged to prop them up. For example, if Delta went under, Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City would lose a total of 50%+ of their flights. That would be absolutely devastating.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        Devastating to individuals sure. I hold a pretty high bar when it comes to something being truly critical enough for the government to bailout, economic concerns never meet that bar for me. If we allowed markets to become monopolized we have to deal with that when the bill comes due rather than kick the can down the road.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        If Delta went under another carrier would buy their planes and gate access at those airports, it might be chaotic for a short time but if there is enough demand to fly from point A to point B someone will provide the flights.
      - JoshTriplett 1y ago
        If Delta went under, one or more airlines would rapidly go "hey, there's a proven demand that's suddenly unmet", and there would very quickly be replacement flights.
- ghaff 1y ago
  We can debate seat pitch I guess but economy seating hasn't been great for decades and something like United Polaris is better than Pan Am first class ever was even if food is arguably a downgrade.
WalterBright 1y ago
Airfares were much more expensive when the government regulated them.
- singleshot_ 1y ago
  You get what you pay for.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Not with price controls.
  - devilbunny 1y ago
    In the US, government-regulated fares meant that fares were basically static on a given route. The only way to bring passengers to your airline was to serve places nobody else did, or to offer extras that slightly offset your profit in the hope that you'd get more, regular customers. Since air travel was substantially more expensive then than now, the amenities gravitated to what attracted the most frequent fliers: businessmen. So stewardesses (they certainly weren't called flight attendants then) had weight limits, age limits, and if-you're-married-you-must-quit deals, and as a glance at some 1970s uniforms will show you, they were basically hiring models who happened to have the right skill set (usually at least one would be a trained nurse, and they all had to be reasonably confident) to dress them in revealing outfits. Like Hooters for travel. If that's what you want, great. If you'd prefer other amenities... maybe not. It has never struck me as coincidental that smoking was banned on US aircraft before no-smoking policies became nigh-universal at restaurants, but in just about the right timeframe for airplanes to shift from a boys' club to a place that catered to families. If you want to pay more to get more, there are a lot of options, starting with coach plus (coach seats, business class legroom, priority boarding) and going through first class before branching out into niches like all-first-class flights (JSX is an airline in the US for which this is the business model; they fly smaller regional-size planes, and the reduced capacity legally allows them to skip the whole TSA and terminal experience and just let you on the plane if you show up and buy a ticket twenty minutes before departure) and then on into the various levels of chartered and truly private aviation. You do, definitely, get what you pay for, but sometimes you don't need a Michelin-starred meal experience. And when that's the case, you've got cheaper options that didn't exist before deregulation (except for Southwest, which avoided problems by not making interstate flights at all in the early days.

akudha 1y ago

Also, just because something is legal, doesn’t make it ethical, moral or fair. It is just that, legal

yadaeno 1y ago

Same with points systems. Why am I forced to understand your made up currency and status system to get the full value of my money. There might be some benefits to price discrimination (which is in effect what a point systems achieves) but the collective time wasted dicking around with points isn’t worth it. Make all point systems illegal.

b112 1y ago
The entire point behind reward cards, is to track every purchase you make. They're the original evil tracking device, so the airline makes money with those points. They do it by selling data, by points expiring, and by often only allowing points when seats would be empty otherwise. And often retailers pay more at POS terminals! This all ties into any rewards program. It's part of the package, even if points are granted for use.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  > And often retailers pay more at POS terminals! This is really the whole point. The sale of data is much less lucrative than the purchases by the customers themselves, especially for the "nicer" cards. If you are a CC company with wealthy clientele, they tend to spend more. This means that retailers are willing to offer deals/rewards to attract those clients, and also that you want to offer rewards to keep those clients. This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away It’s more a sunk cost/commitment thing. Their approvals department keeps away low and inconsistent spenders.
  - arcticbull 1y ago
    > This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more. At the high end it actually diminishes. Rewards cards targeting middle of the distribution are more lucrative, generally. Citi Double Cash gets you 2% cash back on purchases whereas the Amex Platinum gets you 1X on all spend worth at most 1.25% (and 5X on airfare).

sciencesama 1y ago

And groceries are planning a similar strategy!!

listenallyall 1y ago

Flights are definitely not a "simple commodity"

listenallyall 1y ago
Lol, downvotes. One flight will get you to your sister's wedding on time. The other won't. They don't have equivalent value, they can't be freely exchanged.

fallingknife 1y ago

Airline ticket prices are flat since 2000, which is down almost 50% after inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETG01 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETG01. So I say let them keep doing what they're doing.

ceejayoz 1y ago
Is that accounting for things like bag fees and “fuel surcharges” that used to be in the ticket price?
- ghaff 1y ago
  People who fly any amount don't pay for checked bags if they check anything at all.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    People pay billions in bag fees alone every year. https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/us-airlines-highest-baggage-fees/ https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/us-airlines-highe... It’s hardly the only fee, either.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Which doesn't contradict what I wrote. I daresay a lot of families who travel once a year at Christmas pay bag fees for their big bags. Lots of people who travel on a regular basis don't. And a lot of it seems to be on discount airlines. (Which I admittedly never fly.)
      - amrocha 1y ago
        It actually literally contradicts what you said. People flying any amount (at christmas with their family) are paying bag fees.
        1y ago

twoodfin 1y ago

Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme? Simply decide if the ticket is worth the money to you. You typically have other airlines to compare to, other fares on the same airline for different itineraries, and other modes of transit entirely. Just because some people won’t buy anything that isn’t on a coupon doesn’t mean coupons are bad.

alaxhn 1y ago
> Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme? Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  Again, not seeing the “forcing” in that choice of time and effort.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    The thing you're being forced to do is to choose between paying the higher price without screwing around and screwing around in order to pay the lower price, because the option to pay the lower price without screwing around was taken away. This can be true even if the lower price is nominally a discount. Before everybody would pay $100. Now you can pay $80 by screwing around but have to pay $150 otherwise, and the screwing around is $40 worth of inconvenience. $40 is less than the $70 difference between $80 and $150, but $80 plus a $40 inconvenience is a higher cost than the original $100 uniform price, and obviously so is $150.
threeseed 1y ago
Because lack of transparency in pricing affects competition. Which is bad for consumers and the broader economy.
wapeoifjaweofji 1y ago
Many basic financial assumptions regarding the free market are premised on the fact that you can figure out the lowest price a vendor is willing to charge for a good and compare that with how much you're willing to pay for it. Obfuscating this is bad for consumers.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 1y ago

You can pretty easily get a good airline price by following a few best practices. If you are a person who wants the best deal, you grind for it. It’s no different than clipping coupons or waiting till closing time to get pastries at a discount.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Either the DOT or FTC should require that all airlines charge the same price for the same class of service on the same flight. Allowing this to continue is just a normalized, predatory, dishonest, unethical scam under the guise of "capitalism".

krick 1y ago

Uh… It's not that you are wrong, but then you can also just abbreviate it to "capitalism is bad, because <…> it forces a non-negligible number of humanity [like all of it] to waste time and/or energy <…> and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity" I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)