
Cafe owner thrives with no-pricing policy - apgwoz
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/17/lippert.qanda/index.html
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russell
It works because of the novelty and guilt factor. In general it wont work
because people will tend to shave things in their favor. Tips have dropped
from 15% to 10%. If people paid what the service was worth, Wikipedia wouldn't
have to beg for services. If it really were profit maximizing, Starbucks would
be using. (I realize this is an anti-innovation cop out, but I think it's
pretty much true.)

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tsally
This has been tried before and it has failed miserably. Perfect price
discrimination does not work because price is a key component of the average
person's value assessment. I'd be very surprised if it works in the long term
in this case.

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apgwoz
I think that one of the things he has going for him is he's not in San
Francisco, New York or some other metropolis.

After reading Doctrow's thoughts on giving away his eBooks which increases
dead tree sales, I've been thinking about how this model could apply to web
apps.

It seems to me that giving people an option of paying what they want for a
service up front could potentially work. There's a ton of people who would be
willing to pay for the free apps they use. The freemium model seems to work to
some extent, but, I haven't heard of anyone attempting the donationium model
like many museums use. Sure, people ask for donations, but it's left on the
sidebar somewhere. What I'm talking about is making it part of the signup
process. Present the user with a suggested charge of $5, and then give them a
chance to enter what they want. Accept $0, for those that want to pay nothing
and accept more for those that are willing.

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mannicken
IMHO, the model from TFA is based on shame and guilt. When you look owner in
the eyes, and there are people everywhere around you, and hot girls, you can't
really pay a penny for 3 dollars worth of latte.

What do you pay? Well, you don't want to look cheap, but you don't want to
give him $100 bill either. So you usually end up taking a five or ten dollar
bill out of your pocket as a round number. You pay for creativity+latte+tip,
you think. What a creative guy, why not give me $7 or $2 bucks over the latte
price? But you do it out of fear of looking cheap and like an asshole.

However, on the intertubes, there is no one looking at you. Fuck, you can even
use a made-up name! Hence the family breeding to avoid shame by not being
cheap goes out of the window since no one sees you as being cheap.

I'd really like to see my point proven wrong since I plan to do this kind of
payment and I wonder if it's a good way to seggregate market.

