How Online Shopping Makes Suckers/'sʌkə/ of Us All
Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs/'sʌbɝb/? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic/ɪɡ'zɑtɪk/ strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer.
By Jerry Useem
As christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin/'pʌmpkɪn/-pie/paɪ/ spice/spaɪs/ went wild. It didn’t soar/sɔr/, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating/'vaibreitiŋ/ between two quantum/'kwɑntəm/ states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce/aʊns/ jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year later, as Thanksgiving 2016 approached, the price again began whipsawing/'hwɪp,sɔ/ between two different points, this time $3.36 and $4.69.
We live in the age of the variable/'vɛrɪəbl/ airfare/'ɛrfɛr/, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album/'ælbəm/, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird/wɪrd/ computer glitch/ɡlɪtʃ/? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. “It’s most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price,” Guru/'ɡʊru/ Hariharan explained, after I had sketched/skɛtʃ/ the pattern on a whiteboard.
The right price—the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets/'wɔlit/—has become the fixation/fɪk'seʃən/ of a large and growing number of quantitative /'kwɑntətetɪv/ types, many of them economists /ɪ'kɑnəmɪst/ who have left academia /ˌækə'dimɪə/ for Silicon/'sɪlɪkən/ Valley/'væli/. It’s also the preoccupation/prɪ,ɑkju'peʃən/ of Boomerang/'buməræŋ/ Commerce/'kɑmɝs/, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum/'æləm/. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price—and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)
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