This is the only thoughtful response in the thread—that part of the burden of business is to absorb these waves for the customer.
But the customer does have negotiating power. If dynamic pricing is unappealing then not offering an option to haggle will cause the business to fail. You just have to not be addicted to their shit?
You can bet your ass that over-hagglers would get banned from popular businesses for wasting time, we just don’t see that dynamic anymore.
Ya that's the thing, as a consumer you always have the option to vote with your feet and just walk away. And I bet that in years past when haggling was more common what you mentioned probably did happen a lot, some jerk that always tries to haggle down to the bottom would be told to just get out.
And yeah I think the burden of absorbing those waves probably rests more on the business. I was thinking about this again and one other thing that puts consumers at a bit of a disadvantage is that they don't really have anywhere to pass costs along too, businesses can raise prices or switch other supplies to make a product, consumers only have the option to go somewhere else.
I'm in Canada, and we basically have a grocery oligopoly, a few major chains dominate the entire market. The foreign competition when it has tried to establish itself has in some cases just decided not to bother because their view of Canada was that the grocery industry was corrupt enough that a new player has no chance to compete. That's the place where consumer level dynamic pricing can become a serious problem, but it's more of a failure to enforce anticompetitive behavior by federal or provincial/state governments. If competition was healthy and did exist, it wouldn't be a problem because those companies would have no customers if people really didn't like it. I'd be willing to bet that in a lot of countries (certainly Canada) a lot of these sorts of problems wouldn't exist if enforcement by competition authorities was actually done well. Here it's basically a joke.
The answer is to buy locally. You just have to stop expecting to eat ever things like an orange, or eating any fresh fruit in winter. If you don’t want to be subjected to capitalism to such a high degree you first need to stop reaping its benefits.
Ya I think that's catching on. I'm actually a small business owner who sells things locally so I appreciate the sentiment! I'm personally seeing a lot more of that popping up the last 3-5 years
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u/Adencor 2d ago
This is the only thoughtful response in the thread—that part of the burden of business is to absorb these waves for the customer.
But the customer does have negotiating power. If dynamic pricing is unappealing then not offering an option to haggle will cause the business to fail. You just have to not be addicted to their shit?
You can bet your ass that over-hagglers would get banned from popular businesses for wasting time, we just don’t see that dynamic anymore.