Back in the old Zortech days, my partner wanted to offer a great deal to new customers.
When I'm a long time customer of some business, I get a bit miffed when new customers are offered better deals. So I talked him into giving the great deal to existing customers, and new ones get to pay full price.
It worked out rather well!
Even if the fractions are so small that it only amounts to cents, early supporters now have every incentive to tell ALL their friends about it and root for you however they can
As a customer you also get the piece of mind that later price changes won't be unfair to you. You know that you were somehow compensated for your early commitments. In fact you even stand to benefit from all the new customers price drops could be bringing in
Thank you, I knew it was an energy hog, but had never looked at it this way.
That's enough electricity to melt 2 tons of aluminum, or about half an hour of peak production from an average size US wind turbine.
Why don't Kickstarter campaigns have this problem? AFAIK it's because they are just presales, there's no notion of ownership so they aren't treated as securities. A poorly-designed kickstarter that looked like micro stocks would probably get shot down.
You’re always going to have some churn, so no matter what approach you’re taking you always have to tune the incentives so that churn occurs at the level you’ve deemed acceptable. If retention becomes dramatically cheaper than acquisition, then the existing customers/employees really only have themselves to blame.
A good number of companies have committees and HR reviewing salaries annually for anomalies. That does make employment worse in some ways, but at least not in the way you specified.
I do that for my users as well. If I increase the pricing for the paid subscription, all existing paid users will always keep the old, cheaper plan.
I am not a big fan of cable but I have since signed up for time warner spectrum for Internet just in case...
These companies assume we are too lazy, misinformed, and stupid to do anything.
Edit: charter, not time warner (?)
Correctly assume *
HN is not representative of the general population, a lot of people don’t bother to switch every provider every year, especially when they have obnoxious clauses like “this will renew in 12 months at 500% the price unless you send a signed letter at least 90 days in advance.“ Yes, probably illegal, still doesn’t stop them from trying.
Even I, attentive as I am, still get fleeced every once in a while.
I wouldn't have made that step if they hadn't originally increased the price for me while offering better conditions for new customers.
You're always to some extent buying a cat in a bag, once you know what's in the bag, and the payments are set up etc., it makes sense that the service is worth more to you.
The same goes the other way too, however: Acquiring a new customer is costly (see above - you usually have to give them an extra incentive, you need to find/advertise to customers, etc.), so keeping a customer is worth a lot.
Which often means that there are great deals either for new customers or to retain ones that are plausibly threatening to leave (ever called your ISP to end your contract? wondering why many try to force you to talk to them before ending a contract?) and the rest that doesn't have the energy to play the game gets screwed. So you will get the "loyalty deal" but only if you put work into it.
I agree that it really sucks, but I think that's just how incentives are aligned, and incentives tend to lead to outcomes.
And speaking of salaries, I saw fellow engineers that came and went from tech jobs, staying perhaps about a year at each. I didn't have the self-confidence or stress-tolerance to do the same but they always seemed to make bank doing this — getting a larger compensation with each jump.