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Comment by Graziano_M | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely shady, but it's par for the course. Uber charges you more if you have more gift cards loaded, or just spend more on average in general. You charge what the market will bear.

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You charge what the market will bear, not the individual.

No, it just hasn’t been possible to differentiate as well before.

One example is biscuit manufacturing, where it’s a fairly open secret that supermarket own brand biscuits are the same product as name brand, because it’s better to capture that segment at a lower margin than to lose it to competition.

Tech now makes it possible to target individuals rather than demographics, but there’s nothing inherently against the status quo in doing so.

Nothing against the status quo. Yes, let’s perpetuate our dystopian nightmare. Good plan.

The post you’re replying is an ‘is’ post, not an ‘ought’ post.

Didn’t say it was a good plan, just that unless you’ve got some brilliant replacement for late-stage capitalism, it’s a logical progression.

I have a side business and virtually every customer pays a different price, what you’re saying is simply not true. Airlines do it, hotels do it, I have different rates for my customers at my day job, etc.

And even if they pay the same price, they’ll have different costs.

I’ll gladly take all the free alcohol an airline will give me, but other people don’t at all!

I sell some stuff on eBay. If you appear untrustworthy, I’ll spend more for tracking/better tracking on your order so you’ll actually get your stuff faster/more reliably.

Oh, I'm not denying this is the way things are done. I just don't think it should be legal.

Price segmentation was more palatable a few decades ago, but technology has enabled us to push it to this absurd (to me) extreme where individuals get different prices at different times of the day.

It feels wrong to size up your customer and pick the highest price you think they'll pay.

The market is an agglomeration of many individuals, meaning that there is no hard and fast rule that you must charge only one price for the entire market; indeed, many custom-priced products exist, enterprise SaaS being one example.

There's no such thing as "the market", there are market segments that abstractly represent groups of people with similar characteristics. Charging different prices to people in different segments is standard business practice. Burger chains could charge wealthy individuals $100k per burger if they wanted to, just, burger chains usually have difficulty distinguishing the truly wealthy individuals who walk in the door who would have no trouble putting down that kind of money for a burger.

.... which, in the day and age of facial recognition, gives me an idea for a startup.

Burger chains have at least gotten a start on differentiating their pricing - by raising prices dramatically across the board, and telling anyone who’s frugal or just broke that they can only get discounts (to bring prices slightly lower than today’s pricing, but still a lot more than before) if they use the app. Upper-class people don’t bother with it and pay full price, frugal people take the time to figure out the cheapest way to use one of the current “offers” to assemble a meal.

Upper class people don't bother with it because we all know those discounts are temporary but they'll never let go of the data they extract from those apps and will try to spam you

One can always use a fake email and login account. Upper class people don't bother because they don't eat at fast food chains as often enough as lower class people to warrant needing an app for each one; 99.9% don't give a shit about data collection, only people on HN and other technical fora do.

>One can always use a fake email and login account.

When you're using that fake email be sure to have a burner phone or public internet so they can't link it to your IP, also don't use your computer or any computer you've logged in on so that browser fingerprinting doesn't tag you, also turn off your GPS so they can't geo correlate you.

Of course the rich person is in the same boat, their geolocation will log that they went to Burger King, or their credit card company will snitch on them. Okay, fine, pay with cash, cover your phone in a tin foil faraday cage. Now you also will need to drive a 30 year old car to said establishment since the car manufacturer put a cellular modem and GPS in your car and sells the fact that you went to Burger King to the highest bidder.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there are dozens of other ways people are tagged. At some level may as well either use the app or just not go.

Yep, that's why it's usually not worth it trying to pretend one has online privacy.

The market ensure (mostly) there is another individual.

Aren’t they just creating a market of 1?

"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

Aren’t they creating a market of 1?

Perfect!

Pieces of shit. And then they assign you a score for each travel, as if you are really "carpooling" when in reality is a shitty taxi replacement (not that taxis are on a moral high ground, but the point still stands).

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