While deplorable, is price discrimination along non-protected customer segments (“classes”) illegal?
Even worse imo, if it's held to be true, Doordash will be in real existence-threatening trouble with iPhone users and will have to increase its marketing spending towards them drastically.
It was reported today on local TV news here in NYC (NY1), which is what got me to search HN for this discussion.
And since local TV news isn't exactly geared toward the tech savvy, I'd expect this will be widely covered across US media.
That'd put you in the minority, but companies have been working hard for many years to get consumers used to the idea that they should be able to discriminate against specific groups of people and jack up their prices for individuals based on whatever they want. Retail, even grocery stores, have been experimenting with dynamic discriminatory pricing.
I'd love to see laws that require companies to post their prices clearly and publicly and prevents them from deviating from those prices no matter who places the order or brings an item to the register.
We may soon find ourselves in a future where you're required to identify yourself just to see a price because it'll be calculated as a percentage of your total income. Where your political views, your medical conditions, countless proxies for race/religion/sexual orientation, or even who your friends are, can cause you to pay more or even get you priced out of things you regularly buy today.
You might think that you can always "vote with your wallet" if you feel that you're being ripped off, but that doesn't help you when every restaurant and retailer is doing the exact same thing, and none of it is transparent to the user so you won't be allowed to know when you're getting screwed over or how badly no matter which arbitrary metric is being used as justification for squeezing every last possible penny out of you.
> ...no matter which arbitrary metric is being used as justification for squeezing every last possible penny out of you.
This is how free markets are supposed to work. The seller seeks to maximize the price and the buyer seeks to minimize it. Lazy buyers who don't bother checking the competition can expect to pay more.
The problem occurs when there is limited competition. In that situation I'm in favor of regulation (as well as to protect certain classes of people such as race, gender etc). But I don't think that's a problem in this case - or at least, that's not what you're arguing?
I don't see much functional difference between this and what Disney does with their ticketing systems, or what airlines do.
It's not something I'm glad companies are doing, but it's also not illegal as long as it's not a protected class.
Basically
A: I wish doordash wouldn't do this.
B: phone OS is not a protected class because it is deemed easily changeable.
If you can afford to buy the most expensive hardware as a status symbol, don't be too surprised when companies notice and scale prices accordingly.
I don't know if this DoorDash suit named the specific area of law that they allege was violated, but I would need to understand the difference between what DoorDash is doing and my scenario of the car salesman, for example.
Edit: Seems like I misunderstood the parent usage of class to refer to the terms as a sociological term not as its US legal term. Sorry about that
edit: Ah, "customer segments" vs. "classes"; I didn't understand the misunderstanding.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
A protected class is a group that is illegal to discriminate against in this manner, in the United States (and several other legal systems).
"Phone OS" is not a protected class. Many other things are, though, such as Race, Religion, Sex, etc... Varying a bit by jurisdiction and legal system.