Tiered pricing is EVERYWHERE now. In supermarkets, if you don’t have their app/loyalty card you have to pay higher prices. They frame it as a “discount” or “savings” for having the app, but clearly it’s just a punishment for not giving them your info and allowing them to track/advertise at you.
In restaurants/fast food places, you get “discounts” (i.e. regular prices) via the app/email list, and if you don’t have the app or give them your email address you don’t get the discount (read: you have to pay higher prices). And of course they can “tailor” personalised “deals” directly at you based on your past behaviour to optimise how much money they get out of you.
I just looked at a hotel and they’re advertising a “discount” if you give them your email address (read: a higher price if you don’t allow them to advertise at you).
I absolutely hate this behaviour. I know exactly why it’s there: some people are willing to pay more for convenience/no ads, and some are willing to go to more effort / put up with ads for a lower price. Either way they get more money out of you: the logical conclusion of capitalism and chasing higher profits.
It feels like this should be illegal. It feels like a cousin of price gouging, which is already illegal. Ofc it never will be outlawed in america - idk how much this happens across the pond though - but I hope one day this could be outlawed in europe.
Price is what people are willing to pay, so I’m not sympathetic to your idea that the higher price that people are willing to pay to avoid needing a loyalty card is in any sense illegitimate. It might be a different matter if there was simply no option to buy groceries without a loyalty card, but many stores don’t have cards and even the ones with cards often have close substitutes for products that are on sale, so that if you want to you can limit yourself to buying only those products for which the price without a card is not higher.
My more general opinion is that people who want to legally prohibit things that they can freely choose not to participate in, so that their own behavior won’t have to change but no one else will be allowed to do the thing they don’t like, are displaying an authoritarian impulse.
It’s not really an authoritarian impulse. It’s about collectively pushing back against a power imbalance. Supermarkets and large companies have a lot more money and resources than most individual people, and so they are able to leverage that power to make individuals do things that benefit the company but harm society. Laws and regulations are official organised ways of the general public collectively pushing against unwanted behaviour from powerful entities, such as supermarkets.