Can't wait for them to adapt my mcnuggets price based on my credit score.
At some point you gotta accept that this is dystopia.
(yeah, this line of thinking isn't going to go anywhere good)
It seems like something the public will push for if companies overplay their hands and start doing this too aggressively.
The principle that poor people are the majority and prefer to pay less for things.
The principle that it's better for consumers and producers to engage in trade than to force a business to be unviable.
Price discrimination doesn't guarantee cheaper products for poor people. E.g. the same shampoo when labeled for women here costs more. Or say Netflix costs less in some regions that are considered poor, but the rich people there still pay the lesser price.
If a business is only viable by extracting the most from every individual instead of finding a fair price, is it really better for society that business exists?
What a about the principle of fairness and people being treated equally?
Life is not fair from the moment of conception choosing which parents and location you are born to.
> If a business is only viable by extracting the most from every individual instead of finding a fair price, is it really better for society that business exists?
A buyer buying for the lowest price they can and the seller selling for the highest price they can is the definition of a fair price. Since supply and demand curves are constantly in flux, the fair price is also constantly in flux. Hence the practice of haggling with every vendor in old school markets/bazaars, even for daily vegetables.
Hmmm... is it really the "same" shampoo? In my experience, products aimed at women typically have fancier packaging, added scent, and often exotic ingredients (which may or may not have any actual effect).
All of those things cost more money.
It's like the argument about laundering and pressing women's blouses costing more than men's dress shirts.
Men's shirts are more or less standardized, and can be processed using semi-automated equipment, while women's blouses often have lace, ruffles, or other decoration, large fancy buttons, unusual cuts, etc. and have to be pressed by hand.
Markets work better the more customer knows about a product and the company that provides it.
Markets work worse when the company knows more about the customer and the product than the customer that buys it.
It's basically extension of market for lemons.
It’s not an easy question.
I think alternative to making it illegal could be demanding full disclosure to eliminate information disparity. If a company does it, it should make it clear that it does it, and disclose the price range and criteria to determine your price (the latter can be obfuscated by AI-washing though). It looks like in the EU the requirement to disclose the fact of using personalised pricing alone (without further detail) discourages most of retailers from using it.