Coming Soon: Toilet Paper Priced Like Airline Tickets | Hacker News Reader

Coming Soon: Toilet Paper Priced Like Airline Tickets

online.wsj.com

27 pointsnightbrawler26 comments

Maybe I'm the odd ball because I don't have a WSJ subscription (and maybe everyone else does) but the pay wall for this is incredible annoying. I hardly ever read the WSJ so it's not worth buying a subscription but at the same time, I wouldn't mind reading an article here or there like this. It's a crumby catch-22 situation.

I got through by googling "Toilet Paper Priced Like Airline Tickets", no quotes. Many times, but not always, you can get to the full WSJ article if you're coming from Google News.

Speaking of pricing games, apparently the WSJ need look no further than itself.

Yup, that worked. Thanks for the tip! I really appreciate it!

Clicky just for fun: https://www.google.com/search?q=Toilet+Paper+Priced+Like+Air...

There's an illuminating analogy using Being John Malkovich somewhere here...

Airline tickets are fairly unique in how they're not resellable, thus arbitrage is very difficult. Toiletpaper and microwaves don't have this problem.

Toilet paper is in some cases also not resellable.

I expect this will lead to some price fixing. The article mentioned Newegg and BestBuy jumping up their price briefly by $100 or so. To me that sounds like signaling. They are signaling that they are willing to raise prices by sending up a flag.

If others find that agreeable, then they raise their price too. The desire to be in the "buy box" drives prices down, but this kind of maneuver would act as a reset mechanism.

As a counterpoint, the sheer number of competitors will help mitigate this.

I have seen a shop display a lower price if you came from one of the price comparison engines, a higher one if you searched the shop itself. Caveat emptor.

This is absolutely standard for financial products in the UK. The direct price is often more than double the one you get via a price comparison.

For example, I just paid about £410 for one year's comprehensive car insurance with Aviva, via a broker, via moneysupermarket.com. When I went to Aviva direct they quoted me £950.

This makes some economic sense, but as a consumer I just hate it. It makes apparently simple purchases really hard work. (In a similar vein, in the UK it's often possible to save 50%+ on a long-distance train journey by buying a number of tickets covering various parts of the journey, even if you're staying on the same train throughout).

> It makes apparently simple purchases really hard work.

Yup, that's the crux of the matter and it is on purpose. Pure market segmentation as explained by Joel Spolsky[0]. They want to capture the surplus from the <rich or lazy or inept> who can't or won't check the prices while keeping the price-aware customers.

[0] Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

Coming soon: consumers avoiding shops with weird pricing!

I always tried to do this.

Why? I'd rather pay market price + x% rather than the constant $x where $x = max(market price) + y% that "honest" retailers would give me.

1: it's a constant feeling of being gamed. I'll avoid retailers, say, that insist on "loyalty cards", I mean, data tracking cards (or just push them hard) on this basis. I once played the game with register discount coupons -- buy an item, and get a "buy 3 get 1 free" coupon. The next time it was "buy 5" (or some n > 3) get 1 free. The challenge kept escalating (I played 3 rounds).

My take-away: this company was playing psychological mind games with me, was tracking my purchase decision (via UUIDs on the coupons, despite my paying with cash and not using a data tracking card.

2: The products offered at such discounts are generally higher price and offer little if any utility, or just plain crap (e.g.: processed foods you're better off not eating). You're better off buying store-brand, generic, or raw produce.

Decision: shop somewhere that doesn't play mindfuck with you, and/or is conveniently located (time + travel expense + product wastage are significant procurement expenses), and offers a consistent fair price. Extending extreme effort to shave a fraction of a percent off price (or spending several pounds to save several pence) really doesn't pay.

Yes, it's most likely not rational, but to me it feels like being tricked, if the price changes every few minutes. I prefer a little reliability.

Where's the trick? Retailers have always changed their prices for items over time based on external factors, it's just happening faster now.

"it's just happening faster now" That's the point. Let's say I call a shop, asking for a price of a product. They tell me a price of X, so I take amount X with me and go to the shop, just to see that the price eventually has been changed to Y (eventually higher than X). I'm missing reliability here. Sure, prices are changing all the time. That's just normal, but i would prefer stable prices for at least a time window that allows me to think about my decision before i buy.

Way back, maybe around 1999?, I was in London and there was an internet cafe called easyInternet [1]. They had this weird gimmick where the price per hour to use a computer with Internet access would fluctuate according to market conditions. It didn't seem to change that much, but it was way lower than its competitors, so that's the one I went to. I found it to be just an irritant, and would happily have paid slightly more to not have to think about the price changes.

[1] I think this is the group of companies that owns/owned that: http://www.easy.com

You are overthinking the purchase of toilet paper.

(It makes sense for Amazon to think about the price, they are going to sell it thousands of times at that price. But you only buy a case of toilet paper once a year, and it's going to cost you at most $30, so it's not really worth your time to figure out how to save eighty cents.)

Maybe I'm overthinking it. Still: in the sum of all the purchases I do over the year (obviously not only toilet paper), this 80 cents can make a significant difference, if I have to invest the time only once, to find out, how I can fix my behaviour and just follow that pattern afterwards.

The problem is that the way the game is rigged, you can't decide only once. You've got to consciously compare every time you shop.

The cognitive weight of that decision making is higher than a consistent and satisficing heuristic (shop somewhere that doesn' tplay mindfuck with prices and prices fairly).

> Sellers such as children's clothing store Cookie's use software to change prices every 15 minutes

Why does Amazon not provide this service to sellers? It seems similar to bidding for keyword-based advertisement.

Because Amazon prefers to reap the benefit themselves?

The article is good as far as it goes but it leaves out the use of consumer tracking information by sellers. Vendors selling through Amazon might not have that info but major retailers do.

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