Ah, the Tech Revolution - it was supposed to take us to Utopia, but somewhere along the line, the system malfunction and chose Dystopia as the destination. From today’s digital edition of The Atlantic Magazine: Welcome to Pricing Hell On February 15, Ron Ruggless was sitting in his home office in Dallas, listening to a Wendy’s earnings call—something he does every quarter as an editor and reporter for
"Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done." Um, so my personal data (this week = shoe size, discount retail) is public data until the Republican Business Congress is persuaded that making more money off us is not nice?
Seems to be a colossal game of Whack-a-Mole. When the federales come down hard on one practice, say, usurious lending rates, the numbers crowd finds another spot in the economy in which to plant a punji pit for consumers. The current corporate goal seems to be guaranteed shareholder dividends and obscene CED and CFO salaries, with all business risks absorbed by consumers, the opposite of where risks fell under other older economic models. So much baloney is now hidden in the pits of rewards, coupons, memberships, introductory offers, customer loyalty programs, etc. It's an economic phantasmagoria.
As for capitalism, I remember the economist Joseph Schumpeter writing that socialism would crowd out capitalism because capitalism at its foundation is an immoral system. Clearly he was more sanguine about our species evolution than I am.
I'm still reading but I'm commenting anyway. Most USians *still* haven't figured out that "capitalism" and "democracy" are not synonymous. Major education and news media fail. Capitalism has been subverting democracy big-time since the Reagan administration, and for well over a century before that. Why the hell don't we get it *yet*? (See above reference to education and media.)
Hanging is too good for these jibrones. A slow Inquisition garrote, or drawing and quartering, would be far more satisfying (and more of an object lesson)..... It is all too obvious that whatever Smokin' Joe Biden is trying to do to reverse neoliberalism, American business is still firmly in the neoliberal supply-side economics camp, and until and unless that culture is broken or run out of town on a rail, we will not see any significant changes in the way US companies do business..... This simply confirms my belief that I remain an Amish Luddite and not use apps on my phone or succumb to any other of the lures they throw out, like the evil Scylla and Charybdis they have turned out to be.....
Maybe an incorrect observation, but it seems to me that whenever something dystopic comes up, the U of Chicago's Business, Economics or Law Schools are present and accounted for, "...a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,”...
Tragic that no one pays a whit of attention to their Divinity School. Do departments ever engage with one another?
I must have 100 apps on my iPhone I think I'll spend some time tonight watching the news about the insipid bastard's trial, deleting apps that I never use, I know what I use, they will probably fit on one page not 20. The weather channel is the first thing to go, Apple has a weather app, they need to know where you are to tell you the weather and unlike the weather channel they have no interest in your data. When Apple implemented their opt in policy Zuckerberg said that it was going to break Facebook because no one would opt in. I think I'll do a little house cleaning tonight ;-)
Painful as they are airfares are still far cheaper than during regulation.
Wendy's proposal may be unqiue to the fast food business, but its just another form of "congestion-based pricing". These have been a favorite amongst urban planners and greens for things like bridge and highway tolls as well as urban parking, Anyone who's driven across many of the Bay's bridge's will be familiar with it.
What seems forgotten in this kerfuffle are two things: 1) Wendy's will likely decrease prices in off peak hours, and 2) customers are perfectly capable of going to MacDonald's, In-and-Out, or in Texas, Whataburger, especially if the price increases are out of line.
The freer the markets the better for all involved, as capitalism for all its flaws still beats out any alternative. Certainly better than government dictated burger prices.
Yeah, well, I'm already on it; I don't do apps. Everyone acts like they think I'm a Luddite, but I use my phone for a phone and camera and now and then I read an article but my lap top is my shopping and news baby and all that's done in a straight forward way.
You know, with all the "surge pricing" info I think one very common use of it for a service vs product which might have been mentioned in passing if that... but: Easy Pass Lanes or whatever they're called wherever you are. You buy a pass and they grab your info as you pass readers going on and off the lanes and are charged a price that goes up and down based on how dense the traffic is. Not the time of day or anything you could plan on, but traffic which is only very loosely correlated with time. Traffic accident ahead slowing things down? The price could go up. What makes those doubly irritating is that they often use lanes built with tax money and then experimentally or after a heavy sales pitch handed over to companies under contracts to maintain the roads, for example. HOV lanes, converted that way, turn into Privilege lanes and increase the clogging on the "normal" roads.
Pretending "dynamic pricing" serves those who need it most pretends need equates to ability to pay. I'd say it's more like an inverse relationship between ability to pay and degree of stress one learns to or must endure. The statement "according to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital" reeks of privilege in that it is ignorant of the degree to which some must stress and stretch themselves to make ends meet. In fact, the descriptions of rich and poor people sound to me like stereotyping stories made up to justify a point.
until the day he died, I was engaged in a Battle Royal with my father over his utter, complete refusal to allow an internet connection in his house. he said that one time at work, getting a response to a question took the whole day and I'd counter with "now there are search engines. it would go back and forth like that and we'd always end with him saying "it's a place where bad people can find other bad people and plan to do bad things" and capping THAT with with "okay...I just don't think that having the internet in my house will enhance my life in any way I care about." and we'd go on watching the rerun detective show he'd have on, insisting that he didn't know who the murderer was, while I'd yell about it being the third time we seen it and it was the guy in the green shirt...then, five minutes before the end, he'd say "oh yeah...I think it WAS the guy in the green shirt." we'd laugh about it, but it was also always a little bit infuriating.
now is a good time to say that on a bad day, I can calm down watching several SVU reruns in a row, knowing exactly who the pervert is and how he did whatever he did.
and that thing he had about the internet...I am reminded of (I think) Mark Twain talking about how every year his father got a little smarter.
yes, we have amazing conveniences at our fingertips (at least in the shortest possible run). in the long run, I fear more every day that the convenience has cost much too much. when I wax rhetorical, I find myself saying that it's cost us our souls.
the multiple levels of irony involved in the fact that I'm typing this on Substack do not elude me. but shit...isn't IRONY one of the best things ever invented?
"Getting Americans fired up about their personal data has been notoriously difficult, which helps explain why we still have no federal digital-privacy law. Perhaps if more voters understood that strong privacy protections would also protect them from price discrimination, Congress would feel more pressure to get something done." Um, so my personal data (this week = shoe size, discount retail) is public data until the Republican Business Congress is persuaded that making more money off us is not nice?
Seems to be a colossal game of Whack-a-Mole. When the federales come down hard on one practice, say, usurious lending rates, the numbers crowd finds another spot in the economy in which to plant a punji pit for consumers. The current corporate goal seems to be guaranteed shareholder dividends and obscene CED and CFO salaries, with all business risks absorbed by consumers, the opposite of where risks fell under other older economic models. So much baloney is now hidden in the pits of rewards, coupons, memberships, introductory offers, customer loyalty programs, etc. It's an economic phantasmagoria.
As for capitalism, I remember the economist Joseph Schumpeter writing that socialism would crowd out capitalism because capitalism at its foundation is an immoral system. Clearly he was more sanguine about our species evolution than I am.
I'm still reading but I'm commenting anyway. Most USians *still* haven't figured out that "capitalism" and "democracy" are not synonymous. Major education and news media fail. Capitalism has been subverting democracy big-time since the Reagan administration, and for well over a century before that. Why the hell don't we get it *yet*? (See above reference to education and media.)
Hanging is too good for these jibrones. A slow Inquisition garrote, or drawing and quartering, would be far more satisfying (and more of an object lesson)..... It is all too obvious that whatever Smokin' Joe Biden is trying to do to reverse neoliberalism, American business is still firmly in the neoliberal supply-side economics camp, and until and unless that culture is broken or run out of town on a rail, we will not see any significant changes in the way US companies do business..... This simply confirms my belief that I remain an Amish Luddite and not use apps on my phone or succumb to any other of the lures they throw out, like the evil Scylla and Charybdis they have turned out to be.....
Maybe an incorrect observation, but it seems to me that whenever something dystopic comes up, the U of Chicago's Business, Economics or Law Schools are present and accounted for, "...a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told me the public reaction to the Wendy’s announcement amounted to “hysteria,”...
Tragic that no one pays a whit of attention to their Divinity School. Do departments ever engage with one another?
Whenever someone says we should do it their way because it is more efficient, we should ask the question and demand an answer. Efficient at what?
I must have 100 apps on my iPhone I think I'll spend some time tonight watching the news about the insipid bastard's trial, deleting apps that I never use, I know what I use, they will probably fit on one page not 20. The weather channel is the first thing to go, Apple has a weather app, they need to know where you are to tell you the weather and unlike the weather channel they have no interest in your data. When Apple implemented their opt in policy Zuckerberg said that it was going to break Facebook because no one would opt in. I think I'll do a little house cleaning tonight ;-)
Painful as they are airfares are still far cheaper than during regulation.
Wendy's proposal may be unqiue to the fast food business, but its just another form of "congestion-based pricing". These have been a favorite amongst urban planners and greens for things like bridge and highway tolls as well as urban parking, Anyone who's driven across many of the Bay's bridge's will be familiar with it.
What seems forgotten in this kerfuffle are two things: 1) Wendy's will likely decrease prices in off peak hours, and 2) customers are perfectly capable of going to MacDonald's, In-and-Out, or in Texas, Whataburger, especially if the price increases are out of line.
The freer the markets the better for all involved, as capitalism for all its flaws still beats out any alternative. Certainly better than government dictated burger prices.
Yeah, well, I'm already on it; I don't do apps. Everyone acts like they think I'm a Luddite, but I use my phone for a phone and camera and now and then I read an article but my lap top is my shopping and news baby and all that's done in a straight forward way.
You know, with all the "surge pricing" info I think one very common use of it for a service vs product which might have been mentioned in passing if that... but: Easy Pass Lanes or whatever they're called wherever you are. You buy a pass and they grab your info as you pass readers going on and off the lanes and are charged a price that goes up and down based on how dense the traffic is. Not the time of day or anything you could plan on, but traffic which is only very loosely correlated with time. Traffic accident ahead slowing things down? The price could go up. What makes those doubly irritating is that they often use lanes built with tax money and then experimentally or after a heavy sales pitch handed over to companies under contracts to maintain the roads, for example. HOV lanes, converted that way, turn into Privilege lanes and increase the clogging on the "normal" roads.
Pretending "dynamic pricing" serves those who need it most pretends need equates to ability to pay. I'd say it's more like an inverse relationship between ability to pay and degree of stress one learns to or must endure. The statement "according to Dubé, that can benefit rich people, but it can also benefit people with greater need, like someone taking an Uber to the hospital" reeks of privilege in that it is ignorant of the degree to which some must stress and stretch themselves to make ends meet. In fact, the descriptions of rich and poor people sound to me like stereotyping stories made up to justify a point.
until the day he died, I was engaged in a Battle Royal with my father over his utter, complete refusal to allow an internet connection in his house. he said that one time at work, getting a response to a question took the whole day and I'd counter with "now there are search engines. it would go back and forth like that and we'd always end with him saying "it's a place where bad people can find other bad people and plan to do bad things" and capping THAT with with "okay...I just don't think that having the internet in my house will enhance my life in any way I care about." and we'd go on watching the rerun detective show he'd have on, insisting that he didn't know who the murderer was, while I'd yell about it being the third time we seen it and it was the guy in the green shirt...then, five minutes before the end, he'd say "oh yeah...I think it WAS the guy in the green shirt." we'd laugh about it, but it was also always a little bit infuriating.
now is a good time to say that on a bad day, I can calm down watching several SVU reruns in a row, knowing exactly who the pervert is and how he did whatever he did.
and that thing he had about the internet...I am reminded of (I think) Mark Twain talking about how every year his father got a little smarter.
yes, we have amazing conveniences at our fingertips (at least in the shortest possible run). in the long run, I fear more every day that the convenience has cost much too much. when I wax rhetorical, I find myself saying that it's cost us our souls.
the multiple levels of irony involved in the fact that I'm typing this on Substack do not elude me. but shit...isn't IRONY one of the best things ever invented?