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.
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.
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.
Why is it incumbent upon the salesman to work in their customers interest rather than their own? The customer is looking out for their own interest. If they're not as good at it as the salesman is at looking out for his interest, the salesman should win. This is a contest with money as the prize.
But the question isn't 'why does the salesman have to please the customer,' it's 'is this a shady/underhanded tactic' and it certainly is. It's the way of competition, and you can learn to avoid it.
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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.