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.
I keep saying it: just ban advertising.
They want to track what you buy to more efficiently manipulate you into buying what they want you to buy. The data would be almost useless if they couldn’t advertise to you, so they wouldn’t bother. Other places wouldn’t be able to monetize their spyware if advertisers weren’t buying. Political campaigns wouldn’t have even a use for millions in ‘donations’ if they weren’t blowing it all on advertising. It’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry built on lying to people for profit.
What is advertising then? When a company explains the benefit of its own product? A link to a particular product or service? Would word of mouth among consumers be a form of advertising? If not, then why not companies showing a word of mouth for other (affiliated) companies? What is the distinction between a company and the owner in the case of a sole proprietorship?
My point is, if this wasn’t obvious enough, there are so many obvious problems and loop holes with this approach, you should give it a think for 20 minutes and then start saying something else.
Require consent for advertising.
If I seek out information on your product or service then give it to me, sure. Otherwise fuck off forever out of my life, my internet, my art, my public spaces, my media, and everything else that you’ve ruined.
Now that that’s banned there’s much less reason for disgusting shit. My friend had a baby recently and the daycares consent demands the right to share data collected for marketing and market research purposes. This cannot be opted out of and is required to enroll, and there’s also this really gross thing where they do a separate photo consent form that implies that photos won’t be shared but when you read all the consents more thoroughly (there are several) you find that they retain all data including photos in perpetuity and it falls under the category that allows marketing and market research usage if they so choose. For children that are not even 1 year old!
This is a bigger issue on private equity owning care facilities (a whole other thing) but the fact of the matter is that advertisers have 0 ethics and will do whatever they want to whoever they want. They don’t care about consent because it’s an industry run by sociopaths with the mindset of rapists. They will destroy your product or service if you let them in and take their blood money. Once they’re in they will demand more and more until your product is shaped around advertising, either display or data collection to improve targeting for ad spend efficacy. They don’t care if it’s children, if it’s the elderly, the disabled, the extremely poor, etc. anyone can be sold to and anything can be sold. Let’s make some money. Fuck them, ban their industry, burn it down. If you work in advertising you are a piece of shit and the world is worse because you exist. You made bad choices and everyone is disappointed in you. Destroy the industry from within if you can, change careers, or die a piece of shit scumbag
I dunno.
I think they would still collect and use the data to track our political leanings and whether we’re considering becoming a journalist that threatens their empire.
Would banning advertising also include what packaging looks like on store shelves? Becsuse if not, I can see shit getting way worse with how shit is laid out or boxed if they were banned from advertising elsewhere. The product would be advertising itself even louder.
Products already aim to have attention-grabbing / attractive packaging. So I don’t think that is going to get any worse if general advertising is banned.
I’ve also been saying for years that unsolicited advertising is wasteful and harmful and unnecessary - and should be banned. (Well, it’s ‘necessary’ from an individual point of view, because you need it to be viable vs other products. But that would not be the case if it was banned. The massive work and resources spend on advertising are only necessary because of advertising. Killing it would free up those resources for something actually productive.)
There are obviously a lot of tricky issues and edge cases that would need to be ironed out for an advertising ban; but that doesn’t make it impossible. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be an improvement, and it’s not hard to imagine some basic guidelines that would work reasonably well. … That said, it’s complete fantasy that this would happen, because there is too much money tied up in it. The only realistic way forward would be a very slow gradual increase in weak rules about what kinds of advertising can be used.