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toss1 an hour ago

Simple

There are two ways to legally "earn" money. The first is to provide a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price.

The other is extractive — to find a way to exploit the customer with limited choices and extract the maximum value from them. Monopoly pricing is the primary example — people need electricity, housing, food, etc. and if someone corners those markets, or colludes, they can extract a far higher amount of money from people than they would willingly spend in an actually free market of multiple competitors and fully available information (wherein another competitor would offer prices closer to the cost of production and take the business from the overpriced competitor).

Production of value is the essence of the value of capitalism. Extracting value by coercion is fundamentally corrupt, and at the extreme end is nothing more than mob rule ("nice store windows you got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them; pay us for protection").

Surveillance pricing is simply a fundamentally dishonest form of the latter, exploiting massive amounts of information on customers to extract more money from a person than they would be freely willing to pay for a product, because you found a temporary or permanent vulnerability and 'have them over a barrel'.

A society that permits surveillance pricing will inevitably become more impoverished because the few players doing surveillance pricing will extract more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value. This impairs everyone else's ability to provide value.

Allowing it is fundamentally stupid and self-destructive.

8note 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

i expect rather than being a couple stores doing it, it will be a separate company acting as a cartel across stores forcing some people to always pay more no matter where they go