Soaking the Rich

I suggest a separate vision, one that may be more disturbing to most of us. It involves merchants’ use of our personal information to provide differential levels of service, or even differential prices, to different people for the same product or service. Airlines already sell their tickets to us by name, and they’re not transferable. Thus, they can offer tickets for adjoining seats on the same flight at an array of prices, making educated guesses about what a particular customer is willing to pay. Last-minute business travelers are a lot less price sensitive than students willing to be flexible about dates and times, and the respective prices reflect that. In a latter-day version of Robin Hood’s redistributive crusades, executives on expense accounts are now soaked to subsidize the travel of a sophomore on spring break.

But the airlines’ presumptions about the thickness of our wallets pale in comparison to the wealth of data available on the Web. Suppose Amazon.com quoted you a different price for a book than to your next-door neighbor? Indeed, imagine that everything on the Web were priced with just you in mind. Buying a week’s worth of groceries can suddenly involve as much price variation as buying a car, a project in which a talented salesperson can extract several thousand dollars more from the rich (or foolish) than from the poor (or frugal). What coupons only roughly hinted at (those who don’t bother to clip them pay more for the same products as those who do), the Web may force outright.

Of course, as long as customers can shop for a better price elsewhere, it will be difficult for merchants to soak not just the rich and lazy, but also the rich and frugal. Yet that may change: Even as the Web has made it easy to jump from one site to the next to compare prices, some merchants are trying to prevent so-called meta sites like MySimon.com or Pricescan.com from assembling comprehensive rosters of prices to allow for ready comparison. (Indeed, they’re claiming that the meta sites’ robots are engaged in cybertrespass as they gather pricing information.)

Price isn’t the only variable at work. There’s service too. Banks have long kept notations on customers’ records, grading them from, say, A to C on the basis of how much they’re worth to the bank. If a C demands specialized attention from an associate, she may have to wait just a bit longer than an A and be turned down on a request that would have been granted instantly to a B.