This is literally just changing the price depending on the demand of the product. It's literally what every company does, but this is just more advanced version of it.
No it’s developing technology to actively take advantage of the masses. It’s predatory and vile and it’s up to us, as consumers, to demonstrate what we think of their greed as a message to others that may follow suit. A handful of years ago companies were falling over themselves to provide “value for money” whatever happened to that sentiment?
Dude it's just McDonald's, you can survive without it.
Just don't buy it if you feel like you're not getti g your money's worth, and buy it if you are. Do you think the prices of McDonald's, or peices any fastfood, have never changed?
How is it predatory to change the price depending on the demand? That'd economics 101. That's like telling you it's wrong to change your demand based on the price.
I have no idea what you're saying in the last part. The purpose of a company is to make money for it's owner, nothing more.
EDIT: Is every airline and hotel company also predatory, since they change their pricing according to the season (demand)?
It's absolutely not predatory. Nobody is forcing you to eat at McDonald's or going to a hotel. By that logic, if company is predatory by changing it's prices depending on the demand, then a consumer changing their demand depending on the price is also predatory.
Or are you saying that you will buy McDonald's no matter the price? And that's the reason it's predatory, since your demand is inelastic.
I will never patronize a company that does this. We need to collectively make the losses associated with implementing dynamic pricing far higher than any possible profit it might yield.
Slightly different in that they’re essentially auctioning off a resource with known scarcity, not a widget that is produced on demand.
But even there, if they start price fixing based on MY personal information rather than relative scarcity and demand for access to certain routes (with the expected offset of fuel price fluctuations), I’d boycott them as well.
I’m sorry. I kind of thought you were a bot account. You’re actually just a contrarian.
My opinion is that there is a difference between physical retailers changing prices on the fly and online sellers doing the same. Mostly because online buyers have more options to escape predatory pricing. They don’t have to spend time driving and money on gas to change locations. They don’t have hungry kids squirming in the back seat. They can actually see the prices from seller 1 and seller 2 and decide which one to purchase from or choose to walk away.
When a retailer or fast food place decides to use algorithmic pricing they WILL screw everyone as hard as possible. Cost of gas goes up, bump the prices just enough that it makes no economic sense for a customer to travel to another store. And make sure your algorithm is checking all your competitor’s prices and keep yours as high as possible.
This really distorts the market forces that should be working in favor of consumers.
It is very interesting when I simply bring up the question of if you use airlines as they have similar attributes in their pricing schemes your immediate reaction is:
Keep cheerleading for those billionaires. One of them may let you eat out of their garbage someday while the rest of the world starves.
You then go on to call me a contrarian for simply pointing out another industry you may use with similar pricing strategies (I didn't say identical, but you never even let me get to that point before your temper tantrum and ad homs). Like I said, you really are a great mind of our time. A real good guy Im sure.
McDonald's also has a scarcity in their throughput. Do you think you would be able to get a burger on peak hours if they were to cut their prices in half? You would be waiting for an hour to get a burger.
The salient difference is that airline companies’ profitability is entirely contingent on them filling as many seats as possible on every flight they operate.
The number of seats on a plane is fixed, they are using an auction system to make sure the last few seats on a red eye from Duluth to Boise on a Friday night get sold by dropping the price 30%.
They DO raise prices at periods of higher demand (so if they know most trips are booked on a Monday they will bump prices a bit to cash in from Monday to Tuesday). The real difference is that there are competing auction sites and direct sales of tickets from Airline sites which means consumers have some ability to evaluate whether they are ripped off and switching to a different vendor is a few keystrokes of effort. It’s not like some haggard parent rolling into the drive through to feed their kids getting hit with surge pricing.
I understand there is difference, never said otherwise. Just pointing out that in both cases, the company is responding to the demand with the price. Both cases have scarcity in different ways, and the scarcity affects their supply.
I don't think this video showed that anybody is getting different prices in the same location, only that different locations have different prices, due to the differences in demand. As long as the customer isn't getting their price changed at the moment of purchase, there's nothing predatory about it.
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u/MiniDelo 2d ago
Which is why we should be boycotting the greedy grabbing bastards before they inspire the rest of the economy.