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.

  • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
    9·
    20 hours ago

    So two thoughts:

    1. Get more comfortable with making these people wait. You want an email to give me a better price? That’s fine it will take me a minute to lookup my email address. It’s actually not that bad once you get used to doing this. I do it religiously now when I’m traveling and it’s never been an issue.

    2. Consider using DuckDuckGo’s email feature. They will quickly generate human-friendly throwaway addresses like “geek-rhino-spoon” at duck dot com. I have the ddg browser on my phone and once you have it set up, it takes just a second to search “ddg email” and first link goes to the page that generates a new address for you. So it’s super quick to do on the fly. When they forward emails to you, there is a banner at the top with a link to deactivate that throwaway address you used should you start getting spam. It’s pretty slick in my experience.

    Edit: fixed a typo