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Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to

2007-06-06 10:52:40

different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly

dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online,

but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy,

where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless

specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has

demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time

and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they

are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.

Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices

as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price

won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably

don't).

This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years

back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than

those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing

history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be

willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought

it just went away because of the PR nightmare.

It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these

new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or

"senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably

enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.