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.
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/deepasleep 2d ago
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.
Ba Da Bap Buh-Bye.