3 ms·

I agree that surveillance pricing sounds terrible and discriminatory. But people are also happy with coupons, codes, introductory pricing, employee discounts an

I agree that surveillance pricing sounds terrible and discriminatory. But people are also happy with coupons, codes, introductory pricing, employee discounts and many of the other schemes that do more or less the same thing. One guy who worked for an athletic shoe company told me that they had a special code that their sponsored athletes could give to their friends. In the end, what's the difference?

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> what's the difference? 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.)
- xhkkffbf 3mo ago
  You realize that there's plenty of surveillance in the infrastructure that sends coupon codes to some patrons and collates loyalty points, right?
  - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
    > there's plenty of surveillance in the infrastructure that sends coupon codes to some patrons and collates loyalty points, right? Sure. I choose whether I participate in that when I use a coupon or sign up for a loyalty programme. Surveillance pricing is more universal.
robrtsql 3mo ago
Well, they're all discounts, for starters. 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.
- pc86 3mo ago
  > Well, they're all discounts, for starters. 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.
  - ellen364 3mo ago
    It doesn't really seem the same. In coupon hunting, I might not want to spend time finding a coupon and decide to pay full price. That's my choice. In surveillance pricing, I wouldn't get that choice, I'd just get a custom-to-me price. I'd have no idea how the company decided to charge me more or less than they charged my friend. And no idea how to change the price I'm offered, so it would be terrible if the algorithm decided to charge me +15% for everything.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >In surveillance pricing, I wouldn't get that choice, I'd just get a custom-to-me price. I'd have no idea how the company decided to charge me more or less than they charged my friend. And no idea how to change the price I'm offered, so it would be terrible if the algorithm decided to charge me +15% for everything. What's the difference between this and the company charging an absurdly high base price, then your discount is "customized" to you? That's basically how universities work with various scholarship and financial aid schemes working as discounts.
  - Eisenstein 3mo ago
    What you are saying is that the amount of money people save getting discounts is made up by increases to the retail price for everyone else, and that this is equal to the extra money that individually priced people would pay or receive or discounts, so its a wash? This assumes that the business would raise prices to make more money from people who they think can pay it and give that back to others as a discount. Do you have evidence this would be the case?
    - 3mo ago
sgc 3mo ago
Actually many people thoroughly detest forced "memberships" to pay the actual price of the item, digital coupons, forced use of apps, and all of the other utter nonsense. I hope surveillance pricing bills destroy all of them forever.
- pc86 3mo ago
  Is the "actual price" what you're willing to pay for it, or the lowest possible price you could pay based on whatever combination of membership(s) and coupon(s) is available?
  - 8note 3mo ago
    to me the actual price is in the realms of a couple dollars higher than what the reseller paid for it, to account for paying employees and taxes and so on the price i end up paying is always some multiple of the real price
    - pc86 2mo ago
      Well that's just not based in reality. You might as well be saying "to me the actual price is $0 because we shouldn't have any money like Star Trek." You're certainly allowed to have that opinion, but there's no reason to take you seriously if you do.
clarance 3mo ago
My take on this isn't directly related to the surveillance side of it, but from what I can tell we used to have this model: 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-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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g0coPaZWi4
mindslight 3mo ago
The difference is in degree, and with the point that coupons/discounts/dynamic pricing have gotten to I think we would be better off if those things started getting banned as well. The main point of all of these things is to confuse the market and make it less efficient (so that companies can extract value instead of creating more value). We've gotten to a breaking point, and we should reject all of it rather than justifying new abusive dynamics based on the less-harsh dynamics having been tolerable before companies became completely shameless.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

> what's the difference? 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.)

xhkkffbf 3mo ago
You realize that there's plenty of surveillance in the infrastructure that sends coupon codes to some patrons and collates loyalty points, right?
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  > there's plenty of surveillance in the infrastructure that sends coupon codes to some patrons and collates loyalty points, right? Sure. I choose whether I participate in that when I use a coupon or sign up for a loyalty programme. Surveillance pricing is more universal.

robrtsql 3mo ago

Well, they're all discounts, for starters. 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.

pc86 3mo ago
> Well, they're all discounts, for starters. 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.
- ellen364 3mo ago
  It doesn't really seem the same. In coupon hunting, I might not want to spend time finding a coupon and decide to pay full price. That's my choice. In surveillance pricing, I wouldn't get that choice, I'd just get a custom-to-me price. I'd have no idea how the company decided to charge me more or less than they charged my friend. And no idea how to change the price I'm offered, so it would be terrible if the algorithm decided to charge me +15% for everything.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >In surveillance pricing, I wouldn't get that choice, I'd just get a custom-to-me price. I'd have no idea how the company decided to charge me more or less than they charged my friend. And no idea how to change the price I'm offered, so it would be terrible if the algorithm decided to charge me +15% for everything. What's the difference between this and the company charging an absurdly high base price, then your discount is "customized" to you? That's basically how universities work with various scholarship and financial aid schemes working as discounts.
- Eisenstein 3mo ago
  What you are saying is that the amount of money people save getting discounts is made up by increases to the retail price for everyone else, and that this is equal to the extra money that individually priced people would pay or receive or discounts, so its a wash? This assumes that the business would raise prices to make more money from people who they think can pay it and give that back to others as a discount. Do you have evidence this would be the case?
  - 3mo ago

sgc 3mo ago

Actually many people thoroughly detest forced "memberships" to pay the actual price of the item, digital coupons, forced use of apps, and all of the other utter nonsense. I hope surveillance pricing bills destroy all of them forever.

pc86 3mo ago
Is the "actual price" what you're willing to pay for it, or the lowest possible price you could pay based on whatever combination of membership(s) and coupon(s) is available?
- 8note 3mo ago
  to me the actual price is in the realms of a couple dollars higher than what the reseller paid for it, to account for paying employees and taxes and so on the price i end up paying is always some multiple of the real price
  - pc86 2mo ago
    Well that's just not based in reality. You might as well be saying "to me the actual price is $0 because we shouldn't have any money like Star Trek." You're certainly allowed to have that opinion, but there's no reason to take you seriously if you do.

clarance 3mo ago

My take on this isn't directly related to the surveillance side of it, but from what I can tell we used to have this model: 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-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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g0coPaZWi4

mindslight 3mo ago

The difference is in degree, and with the point that coupons/discounts/dynamic pricing have gotten to I think we would be better off if those things started getting banned as well. The main point of all of these things is to confuse the market and make it less efficient (so that companies can extract value instead of creating more value). We've gotten to a breaking point, and we should reject all of it rather than justifying new abusive dynamics based on the less-harsh dynamics having been tolerable before companies became completely shameless.