In thinking about what my group wanted to research about for our poster presentation, we decided to focus on price discrimination. Paige and I are in the same Marketing class this semester. Our professor just recently taught us about price discrimination and tactics companies use to charge their customers as much as possible. During market research, a company might discover that some groups of people might be willing to spend 30$ on something while others are willing to spend 50$. If they charge the price of 50$, they lose the customers who were only willing to be 30$. If they charge 30$ they are losing the potential profit of the customer who are willing to pay more, or of the customers who assume the lower price means a decrease in quality. Over the past decade, retail stores have begun using a new pricing tactic that allows them to charge both 50$ and 30$ for the same product to attract both types of consumers. This pricing tactic is called promotional pricing. Promotions? You might be thinking that this is common and they aren’t fooling you. But in fact they are. The only offer the promotions in areas where they know the people aren’t willing to spend more. For the people who are willing to spend more, they don’t see the lower price in other stores as being unfair because they just think it is the store giving a sale.
Companies like Amazon are also employing price discrimination techniques based upon their customer’s web searches. People who shop more, or have recently looked up certain items will see more expensive products returned in their amazon search. Amazon’s access to our web searches questions the privacy and security of every consumer. The price discrimination and privacy is bringing about new ethical discussions that are currently being disputed. I personally think that it is unfair for companies to take advantage of the resources they have access to against us. Additionally, I think the American people have become too complacent in thinking our privacy isn’t important or sacred anymore. Our project will hopefully bring the issue to peoples attention so they can formulate their own opinions on the topic and hopefully find a voice to speak out against it.