More about Selective Online Pricing
Online retailers are going to kill the golden goose with these policies. The more suspicious we become, the more data we will be less willing to share -- and the more calls we'll make for legislated privacy reform. It's hard to be a database marketer without data, but it's hard to make the case that you deserve the data if you're going to abuse people's trust.
And I'm still deleting my cookies every day, no matter what Scott says.
Today's Washington Post:
" ... I'm disturbed by what this reflects about our general retail environment -- the evolution of what I would call a culture of suspicion. From airlines to supermarkets, from banks to Web sites, American consumers increasingly believe they are being spied on and manipulated. But they continue to trade in the marketplace because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
"This is a profound change. Broadly speaking, the past 150 years saw what you might call the democratization of shopping in the United States. Beginning around the mid-1800s, department stores such as Stewart's in New York City and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia moved away from the haggling mode of selling and began to display goods and uniform prices for all to see. Part of the motive was self-interest: Given the wide variety of merchandise and the large number of employees, the store owners didn't trust their clerks to bargain well with customers. But the result was a more or less egalitarian, transparent marketplace -- one that Americans have come to take for granted. When they have to negotiate -- most notably in car dealerships -- they see it as an unusual, nerve-wracking experience.
"This reliance on evenhanded, fair dealing lies at the heart of American capitalism, or at least the way we'd like to think of it. It's not always practiced, by any means, as antitrust suits and many consumer complaints attest. But it's a worthy goal, and such institutions as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission were established, in part, to aim for it.
"The scaffolding of this system is shaken if a retailer changes its offerings to individual consumers based on information about the consumers that the consumers don't know, or that they suspect but can't verify."
And I'm still deleting my cookies every day, no matter what Scott says.
Today's Washington Post:
" ... I'm disturbed by what this reflects about our general retail environment -- the evolution of what I would call a culture of suspicion. From airlines to supermarkets, from banks to Web sites, American consumers increasingly believe they are being spied on and manipulated. But they continue to trade in the marketplace because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
"This is a profound change. Broadly speaking, the past 150 years saw what you might call the democratization of shopping in the United States. Beginning around the mid-1800s, department stores such as Stewart's in New York City and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia moved away from the haggling mode of selling and began to display goods and uniform prices for all to see. Part of the motive was self-interest: Given the wide variety of merchandise and the large number of employees, the store owners didn't trust their clerks to bargain well with customers. But the result was a more or less egalitarian, transparent marketplace -- one that Americans have come to take for granted. When they have to negotiate -- most notably in car dealerships -- they see it as an unusual, nerve-wracking experience.
"This reliance on evenhanded, fair dealing lies at the heart of American capitalism, or at least the way we'd like to think of it. It's not always practiced, by any means, as antitrust suits and many consumer complaints attest. But it's a worthy goal, and such institutions as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission were established, in part, to aim for it.
"The scaffolding of this system is shaken if a retailer changes its offerings to individual consumers based on information about the consumers that the consumers don't know, or that they suspect but can't verify."
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