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by Thespian2
1319 days ago
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We may not like it, but your last point is almost the exact definition of what a "price" is. Things don't have objective "prices" as an intrinsic quality. They don't even have "reasonable" prices intrinsically. A price is no more, and no less than an agreement between buyer and seller to make a transaction happen. "how much you can be fleeced into paying" while a proactive way to phrase it, is also "What you are willing to pay." Key words - "you are willing". If it's too high, then it isn't a price, as there is no agreement. Seller wants highest price, and buyer wants lowest. When it's a commodity, like apples at the store, with many sellers of a basically undifferentiated product, prices average out to something we think of as "fair." But when a product is unique, or there is a monopoly on it, seller has a huge advantage in pricing. |
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The difference is that most companies aren't pricing their goods to the maximum amount they think they can get from you personally. They instead price things according to what the majority of their target market is willing to pay.
You can say that ultimately it still comes down to paying only what you're willing to spend, but I might be willing to spend $20 on something, yet also be unwilling to spend $20 on it if I know you've been charging everybody else $12 for that same product. Consumers find personalized dynamic pricing to be unfair and discriminatory and for good reason. There's a really big difference between a company who uses their advantage in pricing to screw over everybody for extra profit and one who uses their advantage to personally screw you over in order to take more from you than they could normally get away with.
Publicly disclosed prices that apply equally to everyone puts a boundary on much a company can take advantage of any one person.