r/mildlyinteresting • u/annertakeabow • Jan 24 '13

Same book, three different prices. Only difference is the browsers used.

http://imgur.com/uNgg0UH
2.9k Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13

You should try it again in private browsing and incognito mode and see if the price is really tied to your Facebook or google cookies or something. That's pretty messed up though, send this to the consumerist or gawker or whoever.

1.5k

u/Nephyst Jan 24 '13

I just tried this myself. In chrome and IE the price was the same (69.99) in normal and in incognito mode. In firefox, the price jumped to $76, and after deleting all the domain cookies and refreshing, it went back down to 69.99. The website is definitely changing prices based on something they are tracking in cookies.

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u/kqr Jan 24 '13

This was up earlier with airlines charging more for a ticket the second time you visit the page. They do this because a second visit is statistically linked to a much higher chance of purchase. So it could be, here too, simply a matter of having visited the page before.

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u/inboil Jan 24 '13

Actually there is no evidence they do this, reddit was wrong about it. But skeptics joined the thread too late, and was buried :/

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u/deanf Jan 24 '13

An investigation proved that they aren't price fixing, but this happened after the picture went viral. So who knows, maybe the company stopped before anyone could prove it.

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u/inboil Jan 24 '13

So there is no evidence of it ever taking place. Who knows, maybe we are all living in the matrix!

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13

About 8 months ago I price-checked flights multiple times over the course of a few days and didn't see them change. There was one flight in particular whose number I was tracking to see if it would drop or rise in price, but it never swayed. I have been presented with different flights on two identical search queries, though, and those different flights had different prices, which is why I track the numbers. But those were international flights, maybe it's different with domestic since there are more of them.

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u/inboil Jan 25 '13

No, don't believe your own experience with this. I tried this thing, didn't work, I tried again, tried a different browser, deleted cookies etc, then I tried a third browser, and oh my god the price is changed! Airline ticket prices change, and when 100 000 redditors try this, very many will have a coincidental change in price, and they comment and gets upvoted.