**From Business Insider’s Peter Kafka and Emily Stewart:**Â
The price is the price. At least it’s supposed to be.
We make exceptions — the cost of things like flights, hotel rooms, or concert tickets may move around based on supply and demand. Try to get on to a nearly full plane the day before it takes off, and you may pay much more than the person across the aisle who booked months ago. We may not always love the setup, but in limited instances, variable prices can make sense.
For most stuff, though, everyone should simply pay what the price tag says.
That does not seem to be where the economy is going. Businesses have gotten very good at leveraging technology to move prices around and extract more money from us.
The newest frontier: Companies using black box software and personalized data to set special just-for-you prices, and hoping — pretty reasonably — that we don’t realize what’s going on. Maybe a retailer or delivery service sees that you’re ordering from an affluent suburb, or using a fancy Amex Platinum card to pay, and charges you a little extra. That will likely seem wrong to a lot of people — but how would they know if it’s even happening?
Which is how we convinced our bosses to let us order McDonald’s and expense it. It wasn’t just to get a free lunch — we wanted to see if we could find out how this variable, personalized pricing thing might work.
Without reading i am going to guess “dynamic pricing”. It has been a thing for a while it is just going to become ubiquitous all too soon. Even read about grocery stores looking into using the system to jack up the rates for individuals.
3 Comments
**From Business Insider’s Peter Kafka and Emily Stewart:**Â
The price is the price. At least it’s supposed to be.
We make exceptions — the cost of things like flights, hotel rooms, or concert tickets may move around based on supply and demand. Try to get on to a nearly full plane the day before it takes off, and you may pay much more than the person across the aisle who booked months ago. We may not always love the setup, but in limited instances, variable prices can make sense.
For most stuff, though, everyone should simply pay what the price tag says.
That does not seem to be where the economy is going. Businesses have gotten very good at leveraging technology to move prices around and extract more money from us.
The newest frontier: Companies using black box software and personalized data to set special just-for-you prices, and hoping — pretty reasonably — that we don’t realize what’s going on. Maybe a retailer or delivery service sees that you’re ordering from an affluent suburb, or using a fancy Amex Platinum card to pay, and charges you a little extra. That will likely seem wrong to a lot of people — but how would they know if it’s even happening?
Which is how we convinced our bosses to let us order McDonald’s and expense it. It wasn’t just to get a free lunch — we wanted to see if we could find out how this variable, personalized pricing thing might work.
[Read more about our experiment — and what Uber had to say about it. ](https://www.businessinsider.com/big-mac-mcdonalds-uber-eats-price-experiment-delivery-fee-charges-2026-3?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insider-economy-sub-post)
What’s the SECRET reason?
Without reading i am going to guess “dynamic pricing”. It has been a thing for a while it is just going to become ubiquitous all too soon. Even read about grocery stores looking into using the system to jack up the rates for individuals.