[MichaelBurge]

If a kid screams in the restaurant and they have a policy of giving him a free lollipop to calm him down, that doesn't mean we need an app to keep track of the restaurants you've visited without claiming your free lollipop and then hire a company to go around with an automated screaming device to coax dozens of lollipops out of the local businesses.

This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular form of customer service. It just seems like greed more than any real value.

Now, those old scummy companies that used to offer rebates while employing actuaries to calculate percentage chance that you won't cash the rebate, intentionally make the process difficult, and then profit? Go ahead and run those guys into the ground. If someone could upload a scan of the rebate and have you guys do the rest, I wouldn't mind that.

[ericglyman]

It's a good point.

But I'd challenge you on your assumption that this is a bad thing for stores and consumers.

It's a powerfully negative experience to buy something, and then find out within a few days (or hours) that it's selling for far less. It happens millions of times per day (www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2014/11/20/amazons-pricing-strategy-makes-life-miserable-for-the-competition/), and most people don't find out. But the reality is that it's happening.

A customer could return it for free (and re-buy it -- many states require this by-law). Or a store could do good by the customer and give a price adjustment.

It turns out that when stores do good by customers when this happens, shoppers become far more loyal (and spend FAR more on average too, growing store top-line & often net bottom line). This is part of the secret of Amazon Prime.

While I can't claim that it is the right or only view, I fully believe that stores will benefit far more than the costs.

*Revised based on mquander's feedback

[MichaelBurge]

I love a good story, but I think you're embellishing this one a bit much. It sounds a little like "We're rescuing victimized consumers from abusive companies employing teams of uptight actuaries intent on nickel-and-diming you wherever they can".

They might very well be conniving, but your app to me feels more like those people that save up a bunch of coupons and walk out with a cart full of groceries and the grocery store actually owing them money. There's nothing wrong with that: I have no doubt that the CEO of Fred Meyer still rues that day in college that I walked into one of his aisles and walked out with a bunch of cartons of eggs.

People aren't victims when a company offers a product at a price that the customer is willing to accept. I'm sure you have a fine app that will save some people some money, but we're not rebels striking an uprising against our grocery store overlords who dare to sell overpriced eggs to underprivileged American consumers.

(edit): The parent post has been edited to sound less like a movie trailer, so my post may now sound out-of-place.

[mquander]

This is totally irrelevant to the parent's point, that point being that Paribus seems to be defecting in the refunds-when-reasonable game in a way that will probably harm consumers in the long run. It irritates me that you just wrote a bunch of talking points. Your response downthread was a lot better.

(Disclaimer: I use Paribus but it never got me any money yet.)

[jegoodwin3]

Is it like a kid screaming and paying people to shake down restaurants? Not really. The essence of the problem solved is information asymmetry. To see this, break the app into two apps -- one that simply informs you that you missed out on a deal and makes you feel bad, and one that compensates you and makes you feel better by giving you a savings.

This is a side-payment, as in Coase's theorem. You are outraged at the side-payment, but that just hides the information asymmetry under a cloak of disgust. There is no valid reason that the purchaser should not learn the price subsequently dropped -- but the nature of homo economicus being what it is no one will use the first app without the second.

This app is an application of Coase's theorem, and takes an externality (uninformed consumers are like a clean river to dump bad pricing into at a profit) and internalizes that cost by making companies pay it -- it is always better for the market if costs are internalized, assuming markets work at all.

It doesn't matter whether the company or the consumer pays, according to Coase's theorem. The result will be the same. We might invent reasons to be outraged that the company pays, but really all that has happened is a market inefficiency -- information asymmetry -- has been eliminated. Prices are less sticky and more flexible. This is good.

[downandout]

>This seems like the kind of company that would spoil this particular form of customer service.

I strongly disagree with this, and I have some real world evidence to backup my point of view that companies want customers to take advantage of these policies. Walmart has a feature in their app called Savings Catcher. When you buy something from there, you simply hold the receipt's bar code under your phone's camera for a few seconds. They automatically keep track of the prices of every single item you bought. When prices drop within the policy period, it is added to your Savings Catcher balance, which can be transferred to a virtual Walmart gift card for spending at any time the customer chooses.

If one of the world's largest retailers finds value in automating this process for their own customers, I can't imagine that other companies with this exact policy in place have a problem with people taking advantage of it.

[mc32]

On the one hand, I'd rather Amazon and others not manipulate pricing to squeeze a couple extra pence from their customers, on the other hand, exploiting social norms undermines society and eventually you lose those nice things in life you could count on in a given society.