Pricing goods or services is an interesting subject. For one, it is often painful for both the companies doing it and the customers of the companies. Of course the party charging something is often the happier one of the two whereas the paying party is often substantially less happy, but there are hurdles for both. From noticing how a piece of clothing you just bought was 50% off the following week to dealing with arbitrary “discounts” on cars and other big items, there are many things to be annoyed with in pricing.

To mention just a couple of the numerous annoying examples:

  • One of the most blatant examples of misleading consumers is in grocery packaging. Larger packages tend to hint at a less expensive price per unit than bigger packages, right? This is how, according to all logic, it’s supposed to work anyway with less packing materials spent and all that. But next time you’re at a grocery store, check out the prices of some goods. Like the examples below; both identical products with the only difference being the size of the package.

    Orange juice; the larger carton of 1.5 liters is more expensive per liter than the one-liter carton. Not by much, but still.

    With eggs there’s a more marked difference the wrong way; the larger package is over 25% more expensive per kilo than the smaller package.

    So by saving the store money by buying in bigger packages (and, thus, being more ecological too), the consumer is punished with per-unit price hikes? Nice. Not.

  • One of the most persistently user-unfriendly models is pricing for mobile data. I think it can, by now, be assumed that the operators do want people to use data services. That’s what they’ve been saying a long time now anyway. We finally have flat-rate plans for mobile data in Finland, too, but they are not always the cheapest option – to figure out what is, you’re going to have to know how much data you use per month. So how much data do you use? If you’re anywhere near a normal person, you don’t know and you don’t care. And you shouldn’t. The value is not in the data amount, it’s in the service.

     
    So the question really is: why can’t operators automatically select for you, on a month-to-month basis, the plan that minimizes your data costs? Heck, I’m sure they could even charge €1 or €2 monthly for the service. Not to mention it’d be good customer service.

  • Banks are great at coming up with “self-service fees”. I fail to see why exactly we the customers would have to pay for doing something ourselves. Sure the new systems like web banking platforms need computers and software and all that (a part I know all too well) but one of the major reason they are trying to move everything to self-service is to achieve cost-savings by firing – oh, excuse me, “letting go”, as if they were being held hostage by their employers and releasing them was somehow positive – the people. Some time ago I talked to a bank teller who revealed that her job description at the moment included instructing people to use the automated bill payment services, knowing fully well that this will eventually make her job redundant. Kind of like software engineers being told to train their outsourced replacement before being fired – not exactly an uplifting task to do.

Oh, right, the point of all this? I say if customers are made to pay extra for saving a company some money it should at least be honestly stated as to what’s going on. Like maybe with a sign saying “Help us make even more revenue by buying this more expensive option!” instead of trying to dupe the consumers into paying extra.

And the funny/ironic/sad thing about all this is that most of the time when a company has decided to do “the right thing”, it has turned out to be a financial success. (Just read the book on Patagonia for many good examples).