"Nothing particularly weird about that... except the "discounted" price was exactly the same as the price I'd seen a few days earlier. Using a price tracker, you can actually see that the listing was briefly restocked at a higher price purely to enable the 25% discount badge. The UI is screamin' you're getting a bargain, you'd be silly not to grab it now, while nothing has materially changed except my perception."
"If demand picked up for a particular item, they could increase or discount. This all changed when a family known as the Quakers (of Quaker Oats fame) implemented what they called the "one price" option. They started posting prices for things publicly, which allowed consumers to compare across stores, and that created a new kind of equilibrium and the humble price tag was born."
"A thing called dynamic pricing, the algorithmic reincarnation of old-school haggling, was invented. Explicitly designed to discover the highest price at which a sale can actually be made. As companies increasingly shared data and responded automatically to competitor listings, it has become easier than ever to keep prices in lockstep in favour of businesses and not consumers. These days, it's not uncommon to find digital price tags updating in real time to match market conditions for optimal profit extraction."
Online marketplaces sometimes display percentage-off badges by temporarily raising list prices, creating the illusion of a discount while the final price remains unchanged. Price trackers can reveal brief restocks at inflated prices used solely to enable conspicuous discount labels, altering consumer perception without material change. In the 1800s, posted prices introduced by merchants such as the Quakers created transparent, one-price retail and stable price tags. The internet age reintroduced fluid, opportunistic pricing through dynamic, data-driven algorithms that search for the highest price consumers will pay and enable real-time, profit-focused price adjustments.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]