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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

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>The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons

It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?

Yeah I think it's fine. I actually like that people who are short of money can put the effort in to knowing where and when all the sales are and live a bit cheaper, and I'm ok with subsidising them.

> Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more...?

Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. Price discrimination is very much the same thing, just with the mechanism obfuscated and dressed up in pretty language so that it doesn't trip people's "this isn't right" detector as easily.

>nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much

Are you sure? People often cheer on this kind of thing if they also think Bob's an asshole. (And there's no rule against it in most places unless you don't like Bob for fairly specific reasons)

People will often cheer on all kinds of disgusting behavior including torture. Our laws should help to discourage the base instincts we haven't grown out of and make our lives more fair and reasonable than it would be if we left things to the whims of angry mobs, robber barons, and bigots

>Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much.

This isn't as airtight proof of "unfair" as you think it is. Moreover this happens all the time without people being outraged. McDonalds might charge Joe $5, and Bob $10 for the same burger, because McDonalds likes Joe very much for using their app, so they send him offers.

Even if we do grant that charging people different prices is fundamentally "unfair", it leads to all sorts of strange conclusions. For instance if some retailer has some product on discount today only. Is that also "unfair"? I don't see how "buys a fridge on Wednesday rather than Thursday" is a morally justifiable reason to give different prices than say, being able to scout out a coupon or not. Should we ban time limited sales as well?

There's a huge difference between a limited time sale that anyone can take advantage of vs charging higher prices to "the wrong sort of people" which is bigotry or "We'll use facial recognition to ID you, look up how much money you have, and charge a percentage of your income" which is where things are heading right now.

McDonalds gives people deals in their app because it tricks people into installing the app which they use to collect their customer's personal data (even when they aren't using the app) which they can sell or exploit in any way they see fit. It's a terrible deal for the customer, but they don't know any better because they don't get to see how that data is used against them.

Price discrimination leads to exploitation and enables bigotry. We've been being conditioned to accept it because ultimately companies want to abuse it to make more money at your expense. The only thing standing in their way is that most people understand that discriminatory pricing is unfair and dangerous https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3

Price discrimination isn't just "rich people pay more." It's also, "Our data shows that people in these demographic locations will pay more."

Nobody claimed it was somehow 100% accurate. After all, it's not like many stores ask for your tax returns before telling you the price (although they might very much would like to). The point holds even if it's approximately true.

The entire point of doing price discrimination is so that you can keep a price high while tamping down any market pressure that would normally encourage you to lower your prices.

If McDonalds had to choose one price for an 8 piece nuggets, they would have to make a choice to either be ultra cheap, and anyone could happily afford those McDonalds nuggets like it was the 80s again, or they could choose to target up market, in which case they would compete with other expensive nuggets and some other business could take the market share for "extremely cheap nuggets"

Price discrimination distorts natural market forces that would otherwise drive competition, create opportunity, or "punish" hostile practices.

> The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

That's not all of what coupons are for.

They're also a form of advertising. If you give them out to an influencer in your niche who can bring you great customers, you can make a lot of extra profits.

Imagine you're making an app for managing hair dressing salons. If there's a particular Youtuber popular among hair dressing salon managers, you can do a deal with them where their viewers get 20% off on the first year of their subscription to your app, and the influencer gets an extra 3% of that revenue.

You do this because you expect that people watching that channel are already hair dressing salon managers, and hence are very likely to become big spenders with your company once they start using your services. It's a great deal for everyone.

Honey turns that on its head by indiscriminately offering that influencer's valuable voucher code to everyone, reglardless of whether they've seen any of their videos.

I think it's fine. For things that aren't too expensive where I am fortunate enough to not have to be price-sensitive, I don't bother with coupons beyond a cursory Google search.

But not everyone is equally fortunate, and for some people the time investment to find the right coupon might be what makes them able to afford a necessity.

> Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work.

Then you miss the point of the coupon codes, they're for measuring ad effectiveness. The discount is the incentive for the customer to reveal to the business where they learned about the product and who was responsible for the sale.

Better for you, worse for me.

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