Ask Lemmy

I just give them my old landline number that’s been disconnected for years since I just use my cell phone now

dude just use the store card like the rest of the town. number's 8675309

I live in Japan. The weak yen meant it was hard to afford traveling overseas even to see my family. Now, thanks to overtourism, it's hard to even travel domestically because hotels and places increase prices to get tourist money pricing locals out. In this context, I'm perfectly happy to have resident vs tourist tiered pricing. Some hotel prices have doubled.or even tripled compared to when I got here and my salary has certainly not made that same jump (and indeed my salary converted to USD is more like what I made 20+ years ago in the US).

Discounts for seniors (health copays here even drop with age), disabled, students, etc. make sense to me.

I am not a fan of loyalty-card-based discounts or anything like that.

Payment methods I get because the processors take a cut. I have a small business so I either punish people paying with cash by raising all prices or have other payment methods priced to offset the processor's cut (I sell produce from my tiny farm). I don't want to punish people paying in cash to support card payments. Cashless societies have a lot of dangers and punish those suffering from being unhoused and other issues, but that's a whole other story.

I keep saying it: just ban advertising.

They want to track what you buy to more efficiently manipulate you into buying what they want you to buy. The data would be almost useless if they couldn't advertise to you, so they wouldn't bother. Other places wouldn't be able to monetize their spyware if advertisers weren't buying. Political campaigns wouldn't have even a use for millions in 'donations' if they weren't blowing it all on advertising. It's an entire multi-billion dollar industry built on lying to people for profit.

I can't stand it either. At least in most cases you can give a throwaway email to get the better pricing. It's kind of the devil you know at this point.

Dynamic pricing, on the other hand, is true evil as I see it. Adjusting prices on the fly to suit whatever arbitrary condition is set by corporate jerkoffs...it's price gouging in real time.

I want them to stop saying something is 399 and just come out and say it's 400.

Yes, it’s clearly a prong of a breach of the public trust…late stage capitalism stuff.

In the context of a supermarket (but applies to most other sectors), the major players have functionally agreed to split territory rather than compete for existing ones. So, in lieu of competition, basically what we see is forced loyalty where they attempt to capture each consumer entirely in their networks. It’s the answer to the “Wal-Martification” of the west: there’s still a skeleton of anti-trust so we’re not seeing 3 Wal-Marts split up the world…we’re seeing alliances of mega-corporations from different sectors work together.

What this looks like is your grocery store soft forcing you to use their preferred bank, gas station, sporting good store, etc, in exchange for what used to be normal prices. The only way you can avoid it is by having more money so you can join a more elite network that gives you a different illusion of selection and deals.

The horse has almost entirely left the barn. Long ago we allowed retailers to envelop too many sectors, retailers to own their manufacturers, retailers to forge monopolies. It was, of course, all promised to bring savings to the consumer…but all it does is bring profits to the few.

Somehow I feel ok with tiered pricing when it isn't targetted/personalised. Most barbers have a lower price for children and for over-65's, which I'm fine with. And I have no problem with student pricing, or some places which offer a discount to nhs or army staff. Those make sense to me and I have no problem with them.

But those feel distinct from "fuck you, get our app or give us your email address and your phone number, or else we will charge you more", which is now how a lot of places seem to work, and most people just don't seem to care and happily download a thousand apps and sign up for a thousand mailing lists to get 5% off.

Am I wrong? Is there a counterargument, or is this just how business works now? This is IRL enshittification. Do you agree?

It depends.

Tiers based on age, disability, or ability to pay (e.g. child/senior tickets, lower prices for people who might not be able to fully enjoy an activity due to a disability, low-income people getting cheaper bus fares, etc) are all generally okay, because they expand access, tend to make things more affordable for those who actually need it, but don't cause massive unjust increases in pricing for others.

Personalized pricing however should be illegal in most cases. (e.g. you order McDonald's through the app and they charge you an extra $0.10 on every item compared to the in-store menu just because you got your paycheck recently.)

As for all the discount/reward/loyalty programs, I'd say it depends. If my small local grocery store gives me coupons in their email newsletter, that's fine. Hell, even if larger chains do it, if the discounts are on a specific selection of items, and are probably designed to get you to spend money on stuff you otherwise wouldn't have purchased, it doesn't really matter to me if I can get them or not by giving my email, and isn't that unfair.

If your rewards app is akin to a punch card like the one at my local ice cream place where if you buy 10 scoops, you get another one free, that's also fine. It's just a way to keep track of how loyal you are to the business so they know when you're allowed a little bonus, and they benefit from you coming back to them instead of another place, because you're betting on that free scoop.

If a place prices everything higher than they would normally do it should they not have an app, then requires you giving up sensitive personal details to lower it back down to a reasonable rate, that's unfair, and should be banned.

If the place prices items down just a little lower than they would normally price items even if they didn't have an app/newsletter, because apps/newsletters are generally just a good way to keep customers around and increase sales, that's fine by me. (e.g. if my local grocery store just sends me an email saying "hey, we now have X item in stock" and it interests me, they're gonna get a sale they otherwise would not have gotten had I not been signed up to their newsletter, and that offsets a small discount on everything else I buy there)

Tiered pricing is EVERYWHERE now

I don't really run into it. Two stores I go to still use the "put in a phone number" (any number) and the price comes off. I have been using a friends mothers phone number for decades at one of them, and usually only for beer just for the fun of it.

The third just swipes their own card if you don't have one, and that's that.

The coop I go to has tiered pricing, you pay a one time lifetime member ship of $10. If you don't its 10 percent more. Unless you are struggling, then they slide all the food prices to what you can afford.

I never eat fast food, because I like food. Fast food has always been a bad deal anyways.

But I sure see it in the other industries where it has been built in since forever: tickets, travel, lodging. I don't care for it there, but it seems a lot more insidious when they are targeting a basic human need like food.

Yes, price discrimination is discrimination and should be illegal.

This is another example of why businesses should have regulations.

Prices should be required to be identical regardless of method of order. In person, in app, 3rd party app, etc.

Prices should be required to be identical regardless of the individual person ordering. Discounts for groups of people such as seniors and children would be allowed.

I pay for an email alias service, every service gets a unique email which I can disable or delete when they start spamming.

I don’t think it’s wrong for shops to offer a simple, optional reward program (spend x amount, get y discount) as an incentive to shop there. Often you can enter a fake name and temporary email address or email alias (simplelogin.io has a free plan for aliases).

It’s excessive data collection for targeting advertising, the push to install apps, and dynamic pricing which I strongly oppose, especially when there is a lack of transparency surrounding it.

For what it's worth, I don't think I've ever been to a grocery store where, when asked if I had the loyalty card and I said no, they didn't just scan their own thereby giving me the discounted prices.

I like how OP points out a cultural issue, and everyone in the comments explains how to use the loophole.

If you need a loophole to deal with some bullshit, you're part of the problem.