Yeah, but a rational business would give minorities lower prices because they're generally poorer, which is absolutely the opposite of what's going to happen.
Personalised pricing is so funny. People would very very rapidly realise that you pay less if you're less domesticated and start training themselves to be less domesticated to corporations.
It is literally the worst idea they've ever had. It will actively provide a monetary incentive for consumers to train themselves out of being cucked by consumerism.
You're not thinking insidiously enough. It'll be an excuse to raise prices across the board and then provide incentives for constant consumers that return prices to a lower, but still higher than now, point. Instead of a cold and calculating "someone making 3x as much will eagerly spend 50% more on this without thinking about it" plan it'll be "everyone pays 50% more, but good corporate paypigs get a 25% discount off of that, and if their loyalty credit score with the vendor is high enough it'll be 35%!" incentivizing both consumption and subservience while extracting more profit off of fewer commodities.
It'll be the evolution of existing "loyalty programs" and the like, not the sorts of weird idealist "market efficiency" thought experiments the high priests of capital think up when swimming in numbers and models built on flawed and nonsensical foundations. Because as everyone quickly sees, this whole concept is nonsense that implodes from outrage or gets gamed immediately - it only works in on a small scale with passive participants who don't share information or know it's happening. But the sorts of infrastructure the concept requires can easily be used the same way as existing manipulation tactics, just amplified to their logical conclusions.
Right? It's really weird, the natural outcome of this is that people least likely to pay high prices get better offers. So the best way to get better prices will be to deprogram yourself of every bit of consumerism.
What this will look like in practice would be a little different to what I'm saying but the outcome would be the same. People would become less housebroken.
literal physical price tag in physical store
neolibs: "uhhh the internet is gonna make this even more consistent, somehow"
other neolibs: "uhhh the internet will never be more important than a fucking fax machine"
seriously why are neolibs so fucking moronic. I can understand lying for your own benefit but several of these dumbasses ruined their reputations due to being high on their own supply
Everyone thought the internet would make information more accessible and therefore people would be more informed but what it really does is make such an abundance of information accessible that is untrue that people are now less informed.
With that said it's also producing places like this one so we'll see just how that plays out into the future I guess.
This is going to cause tension between the explicit ideology of the bourgeoisie (can make more money by giving poor people better deals) and their actual internalized ideology (lazy poors deserve nothing and should pay ever more). Which I think is neat.
(I don't actually expect this to be deployed though, it's way easier to sell a surveillance based price gauging system to a big company than it is to actually build it.)
I think functionally all the pieces are there (caveat: they're shitty). Pricing is already done this was, except on a regional level. Digital ad buys are done at the demographic/behavioural level. The obvious issues are: fairness perception - consumers tend not to trust companies which may not let them have the best available offer, and data trust - businesses already use the demographic/behavioiral data for digital ad buys so they know that the data is shit. Also, the payoff on doing stuff at the individual level versus a statistical level is usually a few percentage points. It's a significant amount for large corporations, but it would also potentially be too much of a risk to implement. Then again losing the trust of your entire customer base for like a marginal revenue boost for 1 quarter is 100% something corporate America would do.
Want to emphasize again that the data that digital ad buys are done on is doodooo.
Well this is disgusting, but at least it looks incredibly easy to game. Lie about your job, make big purchases on weeks you aren't paid, buy generic when possible, trade coupons with friends, spoof GPS and geoIP data to look like you're in a poorer location. And that's just off the top of my head. Once again the big internet money making strategy is taking advantage of the uninformed and the elderly.
Does that matter? Your ability to game an only roughly accurate algorithm only indicates that the value of your time is less than other potential buyers. They'll be happy to let you pay less, as they're making a killing selling to uninformed or lazier people who have inelastic demand.
Women with a time machine take note: "John Wanamaker opened his flagship department store in an abandoned railroad depot in Philadelphia in 1876 with a novel idea: affixing a price tag to each item"
Seems like this would be easily countered with a browser extension that crowdsources prices. At least, so people would know they are getting ripped off.