Will Retailers Choose Price Tag System That Routinely Bilks Consumers?
Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
In the beginning there were no fixed prices. Every transaction involved a negotiation between buyer and seller. Then in 1861, as Guardian reporter Tim Adams informs us, Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker introduced price tags, along with the slogan, “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” Wanamaker’s stated intent was to establish “new, fair and most agreeable relations between the buyer and the seller.”
For the next 150 years, fixed pricing became the norm. Companies determined prices either by pegging them to those of their competitors or by calculating the cost of a good or service and adding a profit, with an occasional white sale or going-out-of-business sale, or discounted day-old bread.
In the 1990s came the internet, and in the 2000s, online shopping and smartphones. Prices could be changed remotely and frequently. Initially businesses changed their prices largely to take advantage of a shortage of supply (e.g. Uber with its surge pricing) or an increased demand (airlines, in essence, auctioning off tickets to last-minute customers).
http://www.nationalmemo.com/will-retailers-choose-price-tag-system-routinely-bilks-consumers/
And if you step out of the box, just imagine what can be done with voting, oops I forget they are doing it
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