If its something like Airpoints (with many businesses over decades), that's a pretty complete surveillance of your life.
I'm not sure if they cross pollinate with credit cards, but they probably don't need to - they're not missing much.
Name and age are good, but mostly they just care about your postcode. And then they have your shopping record, and that's incredibly rich data for building out your profile (are you employed, do you have kids, what's your income, what kind of lifestyle).
* and that is obviously about combining discounts for price sensitive customers, data collection, and marketing
I'm not sure if they've ever widely put tracking codes on coupons themselves, but "you don't need to cut out the coupon, you can just use this handy card" invention has been around for decades.
Let's say you're a price sensitive shopper. Before you buy stuff, you look at 5 places to make sure you have the best price. Under an individualised pricing algorithm where they can see you doing this, do you think they'll charge you more or less than what you're paying now?
Yeah, on that side of things, it has much more in common with Flybuys etc than coupons.
I'm not sure if I agree! People have the same response with surge pricing, right? And that's very transparently "because demand is high".
And I think if the whole thing was framed as "the algorithm will send out discounts", I'm really not sure if people will complain in the same way.
Cheap Tuesdays, student Wednesdays? Price discrimination! They *could* offer those same discounts on Fridays - clearly they can afford to set prices at that level - but they don't. That's not gouging, that's just normal businessing eh.
The point is that they don't want to lose customers. There will be customers who get charged *less* as a result of surveillance pricing. Is that bad??
Surveillance pricing promises to be better at it. That instead of a simple "people who cut out coupons" vs "people who don't", it's down to an individual level. But that's not why people are mad, people are mad at the concept they'll be charged more. But hang on...
People don't complain about them because it's a discount, but it's not. It's a thing that allows them to keep the price sensitive customers while hiking prices for people who don't notice anyway.
Everything, always, is about charging customers as much as poss without losing them. That's business!
Take coupons. The fact that they require cutting out is the point. The people who are willing to cut out coupons are the people willing to shop around to get a better deal. Coupons are the way to offer those - and only those - customers a discount. Everyone else pays more.
My most unpopular opinion is that surveillance pricing is just supermarket coupons but with computers.
Companies have *always* done price discrimination, to try and charge price sensitive customers less, and to charge price insensitive customers more.
Extremely dad-coded, but Ben Macintyre's Agent Zigzag is so good. Just onto the part where the Nazis are trying to find the "x-ray submarine detector" device that has managed to find their u-boats running silent in bad weather (when they actually knew it was there because they cracked Enigma)
Hot
These guys sure took good notes of their conspiracy to do a coup.
NZ Railways poster c.1980, promoting that Rail Freight is 4x more fuel efficient that road freight, and the NZ Railways is the 'Great New Zealand Energy Saver' Pictures is a DC locomotive hauling a freight train past some farms
During the last Oil Shock in 1979 NZ Railways was touted as the 'Great NZ Energy Saver' being far more fuel efficient in carrying freight compared to road freight.
While still true, we've lost the sidings & the small to medium goods freight service we had in 1979. Time to look to the past for ideas?
Popular Mechanics magazine from 1982, with the cover art being a " Submarine super-tanker" travelling underneath the Arctic ice. What could possibly go wrong? I'm not sure what the smaller submarines hanging about like metallic remora are diff, but I hope they're not drones. Other headlines suggest you can "play video arcade games on a home computer" and also offer "RAF jets: upside down at 100ft". Sounds about right, tbf. They don't recruit based on brains, you know.
With the Strait of Hormuz once again host to militarily encouraged natural disasters, maybe it's time to dust off an old concept?
(Spoiler: it isn't)
But Matt, some things* are too precious to be left to the whims of the market.
* industrial users
Day 68 of fuel restriction level 4: Chris Bishop announces at 1pm that gas bbqs can only be used to cook steaks to medium rare or bloodier.
"cars must drive at fuel efficient speed (40kph) or drivers will have to do community service by doing waiata in the pedestrianised city centre", says minister for cycling and other road uses simone brown
basically, the "this is just the excuse they need to 15-minute city us" conspiracy theory, but for reals
National shunning for inefficient driving (following too close, accelerating too hard, driving a ute to your ad sales rep job)
Daily televised press conferences but for how many cars
GONNA GET SO RIPPED FROM *checks notes* walking to places
Comrades, get your fucking sourdough starters out & primed for STAYING AT HOME
'Flatten the curve' now means to take corners widely to keep up speed and reduce the need to accelerate once turned, conserving petrol
I had a look at Brian Tamaki's Facebook page and sure enough people are making the conection with the pandemic and tying this into existing conspiracy theories about 15 minutes cities, UN Agenda 2030, the World Economic Forum, and so on. It's all become very predictable
Not many people realise they have the humble blue cod to thank for the traffic light system.
This from the 2018 National Blue Cod Strategy.
www.mpi.govt.nz/fishing-aqua...
