From some perspectives charging everyone the same amount is wrong. In fact I'd say my intuitive notion of what a "fair" price was was closer to that when I was young, even being American. If a shopkeeper makes little or nothing selling an apple for $.25 to poor locals but does it anyway, but then successfully charges more of people she judges richer, she is any of remarkably charitable, grossly unfair, or simply doing what's right and expected, depending on one's culture or perspective. Similarly, the mechanic who could charge more but instead charges a smaller amount at what seems to them a fair markup is either an idiot or a good citizen, depending on one's perspective.
Anyhoo, is it fair to charge me $10 and you $200 for the exact same burger? I thought there were rules against this. Why don't the laws prohibiting price discrimination apply to pills?
Further, upthread someone said something about prices doctors charge.
I have no problem with that. Of course different doctors have different prices. Rent, servicing debt, skill/merit.
But I have a problem with that doctor (or more likely her hospital or managed healthcare org) charging different prices to different patients.
I know there's some history here (in the USA), and path dependence. But it is conceptually so simple to make the system transparent, fair, accountable.
> Merely charging different prices to different customers is not illegal, when there is no intent to harm competitors.
So if CVS uses price discrimination to screw-over Walgreens, it's illegal, but if they use it to screw over their customers, it's not (with the expectation that if they screw over their customers, the customers will go to Walgreens).
Thanks. That's an embarrassing oversight on my part.
Pharma definitely has done anti-competitive stuff. But I'm not seeing a connection to the customer pricing we're talking about.
Even so, I vaguely remember something about price discrimination, so care has to be taken when doing market segmentation. Or I could just be making it all up.
Providing something for free is not exactly charging a price, but it is also not something they do. At least I seldom see a restaurant have people in need come into the restaurant and eat for free next to people that are paying. However, to bend your analogy to the current situation, you come into the restaurant, there is no menu, the chef decides what you need, you find out how much it cost weeks later, the price can vary 500% based on which "hunger insurance" plan you have selected. If the restaurant decides to give you the meal for free, they come up with the highest possible price for tax purposes.
Sure and an argument could be made that the specific things happening in this situation are wrong. That's not the argument that I replied to. I replied to a flippant argument that it is always wrong to charge different people different amounts.
I just went to what I considered a clear counterexample, though it does have problems that it is rare (though local coffee shops and bakeries, for example, fairly regularly will provide things for free to those in need within the store exactly like they would for regular customers).
Is it wrong for universities to provide financial aid to those in need?
Would it be wrong for a city to provide subsidized public transportation? subsidized school lunches?
You can come up with other harder to decide examples. A really good one would be whether it's wrong to charge tourists and locals different amounts. On the one side, this feels unfair to the tourists, why should they have to pay more? Generally, I lean to unfair things being wrong. But, the consequences of charging them the same are, to me, much worse, especially as the means of the two become further and further apart.
