
Dilbert on intentionally confusing pricing - gahahaha
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/00000/5000/800/105826/105826.strip.sunday.gif
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robinhouston
What a relief to see a dilbert.com link here that goes to an actual Dilbert
comic, rather than Scott Adams blog.

(For my money, these few panels are more insightful and entertaining than any
of the long dilbert.com posts that have been posted here in the past few
weeks.)

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gamble
One of Scott Adams' great insights, but I'm surprised more people don't notice
it. Any time you have a professional seller and an amateur buyer, confusion is
the persuasion technique of choice.

Car dealerships institutionalized the practice decades ago in the form of the
'four-square worksheet', where they try to introduce as many variables as
possible so that they have plenty of places to hide their margin. This is why
car salesmen hate it when you don't bring in a trade-in or use in-house
financing. It's hard to baffle someone when you're only negotiating a single
number.

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enjo
Funny story:

My wife is really smart, particularly with finance and the like (she's an
academic accountant). So buying a car mostly involves me sitting around and
playing on my phone while she works out the details.

So my wife goes in knowing to the dollar what she's going to pay. The car guy
(certified used) attempts to obfuscate things by talking about the monthly
payment. She must have told him 10 times that the monthly payment was
irrelevant as far as she was concerned. The guy was desperate to introduce
that monthly payment variable...it obfuscates things and anchors you on what
you can afford as opposed to what your spending overall.

We ended up buying the car for exactly what she was going to pay (about 10%
off the ask) using our own financing... that guy was clearly not real happy
with how that turned out.

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gamble
Yep, you'd think that an easy cash sale would be attractive to car salesmen,
but it screws with their compensation system to a degree that they'd just as
soon tell you to suck a lemon. I suspect the reason a lot of dealerships
created 'Internet desks' to sell cars at invoice was to keep their salesmen
focused on the deals where they could still bamboozle someone.

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ZeroMinx
Would be funnier if it wasn't so true in a lot of areas (mobile phone
operators spring to mind. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world,
but in the places I've lived in Europe, most operators have different pricing
depending on time of day, day of week and the operator of the person you're
calling(!))

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ovi256
That's actually motivated by various mechanisms. Phone usage peaks during the
day and during the workweek, falls at night and the weekend. So they try to
encourage usage during the off-periods by lowering price. Classic pricing for
fixed capacity infrastructure. Similar to hotels, airlines, theaters.

Network operators have different transit deals with other operators, at
varying prices, so that's why calls to different operators may have varying
prices.

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abalashov
_Network operators have different transit deals with other operators, at
varying prices, so that's why calls to different operators may have varying
prices._

Disclaimer: I work in the carrier/service-provider facing side of the VoIP
industry and have done a lot with inter-carrier reciprocal and access
settlement in the US.

Be that as it may, passing the vicissitudes of such cost structures to the
end-customer is a form of intentional obfuscation. It reflects a desire to
bamboozle the customer, and also shift more risk onto them. For some reason,
it works elsewhere in the world, but doesn't work in the US from a marketing
perspective; your cell phone air time costs the same irrespectively of the
jurisdiction you are calling, which can range from standard NECA tariff metro
RBOCs to ultra-expensive rural ILECs wielding huge access charge forebearances
(e.g. ye olde Iowa free conference calling scandal), and therefore, regardless
of what the IXC hauler charges the mobile operator to get the call out of the
Bell tandem and to the terminating LEC.

My point is, the variable cost structure of any non-trivial business has
thousands of variables that can change on a monthly, daily, hourly or even
per-minute basis. It is the job of any reasonable business to digest that
through a risk management formula, statistical forecasts, etc. and arrive at a
set of assumptions that can be presented into a standardised pricing structure
accessible to the customer. The price can fluctuate based on market
segmentation and salesmanship (airline tickets, enterprise software, etc.) but
it cannot possibly involve a set of thousands of simultaneous equations that
are up to the customer to (very improbably) mentally solve in an (improbably)
adroit fashion. That is something only healthcare gets away with, as well as
inter-business settlement regimes that have well-oiled processes for dealing
with complex assessments.

Can you imagine if the bus fare changed hourly based on the precise
availability of routes, drivers, who is out sick that day, how much overtime
was owed last night (if applicable), etc?

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compumike
On a smaller scale:

A strange one I've noticed only in the last year or so is non-monotonic
pricing on fountain soft drinks at places like gas station convenience stores.
I'm not talking about the marginal ounce, but the total price: they'll have a
16oz cup for $1.29, 22oz for $1.49, and then 32oz for $0.99! The latter is
featured with a big yellow sticker on the soda fountain, and maybe an outdoor
poster. Of course, all of these are probably an order of magnitude higher than
the input costs, but it's (intentionally?) confusing and disorienting. I've
got to pay more for less, and more if I want the one that will fit properly in
my cupholder.

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cubicle67
my calculator here tells me that 32 fluid ounces (US) == 0.94l. Surely you
don't have cups that hold almost a litre!?

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mahmud
Allow me to introduce you to the wonders of the Double Gulp. It's 1.9 liters
of your favorite colored sugar juice, or Slurpee

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Eleven#The_Big_Gulp>

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cubicle67
well, um... er... wow. I'm not sure how to respond to that at all.

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artsrc
Every store charges $199.99. The intention is to affect you differently than
$200.

What would happen if a retailer said "We want a straight forward relationship,
and not to manipulate you, so unlike the bad guys we are providing straight
forward pricing"?

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Jach
Not every store does ".99". The companies that charge ".99" or similar are
trying to hook you in on a good deal, while the others that round it naturally
are trying to hook you in on a good quality product. Since most consumer
products are just pointless (shiny!) crap I think we see more of the ".99"
used. :)

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chromatic
Some stores use the cent portion to encode extra information: 0.87 indicates a
clearance item, 0.55 indicates a refurbished item, 0.20 indicates a damaged
item, and so on.

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gort
What on earth is going on in that URL?

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jacobolus
Much better one: <http://dilbert.com/fast/2010-11-21/>

P.S. Dilbert’s “fast” interface is as nice as any comic site on the web.
Simple is the name of the game.

P.P.S. I love how the link to it is hidden in the page footer under the title
“Linux/Unix”

~~~
zck
Two years ago, when dilbert.com was redesigned, Adams talked about the
Linux/Unix fast page in a blog post:
[http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/04/dilb...](http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/04/dilbertcom-
rede.html)

He doesn't explicitly say this, but I think the only way he could convince the
owners of the site to have a stripped-down page was to say that the normal
design was not usable on Linux. Certainly they want to push people to use the
other features and spend money; neither of these things are pushed on the fast
page.

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brianwillis
I'm negotiating car insurance at the moment and see this pattern all over the
industry. Policies are so elaborate and multi-faceted that they're almost
impossible to compare. Intangibles like quality of customer service are also
difficult to measure.

If someone's looking for an idea for a startup - Yelp for insurance companies
would be a lifesaver for me right now.

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da5e
I noticed this at the grocery stores. They introduced odd fractions. One week
something would 5 for $4 or 3 for $3.50 etc. Also they put the sale signs in
black letters on red cardboard so they were very hard to read. And of course
they placed expensive things at eye level and cheaper things less accessibly.

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Groxx
Just about every price label (near me, at least, in all grocery stores) will
also include a price-per-quantity. Easy comparison, as long as one isn't
measuring containers while another measures ounces.

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aplusbi
The problem is that some grocery stores (or products, it could be either) use
different quantities. For example, one product might be price per quart and
another is price per gallon. I've even seen volume and weight being used for
similar products.

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sudonim
I frequently shop by looking at the price per amount comparisons and it drives
me crazy when you're looking at two different toothpastes and can't make an
effective comparison.

It is my understanding that this meets the legal requirement, but also
satisfies the business desire to confuse the customers trying to make a
decision based on the greatest value for money.

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Revisor
Well then stop buying toothpaste by volume.

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lwhi
Nokia has pretty confusing numbering for it's phone ranges - consecutive
numbering hasn't usually coincided with a more feature-rich (better) phone.
Another example of segmentation?

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araneae
The worse culprit of this I have seen is DSW.

They have color coded stickers that correspond to 30-70% off each item. So if
you want to figure out how much it actually costs you have to do the
calculation in your head.

What makes this so obscene is that they actually individually print the
original price on that colored sticker; it's not like it would be any less
convenient for them to put down the actual new price.

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enjo
They do have giant charts at the end of every aisle that spells out basically
every permutation possible. I don't think it's intentionally confusing as in
the comic, however. They're trying to anchor you on "30% off!" rather than 30%
off of $145 ($101.50). I've definitely seen people spend who are looking at
two pairs of shoes who end up buying the more expensive pair just because it's
some percentage off.

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joe_the_user
I like how the web makes this kind of thing harder...

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yread
reminds me of this whole AMD/Intel TDP/ACP/Max power/Sustained power. Making
sure you are comparing apples to oranges...

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patrickgzill
I noticed this at Target while wandering the aisles today - 3 for $8 of X? How
many people do that math in their head?

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AgentConundrum
I've become so used to this practice in grocery stores that I "do that math"
rather compulsively when I see such labels.

I'll admit that the average consumer won't bother, but it's really not hard:

8\3 is 2, that's pretty obvious. So you're buying three items for $2.xx each,
so $6 is allocated, leaving $2 unaccounted for. Again, three things, so you're
adding 1/3 of each remaining dollar to the individual price - 2x1/3 is 2/3 or
.66.

$2.66 per item. It's really simple math, but again, the average consumer
probably just can't be bothered to do it. Part of the problem is people who
have just convinced themselves that math is "too hard."

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rapind
I can't believe no one has mentioned payment gateways yet. First example that
came to mind for me.

