On the internet, stores comparison shop you.

Jerry Useem on variable internet pricing and the death of the fixed price. Fundamentally internet retailers can make a guess as to who you are, and how much money you are likely to spend, and use that to give yo personalized pricing - personalized to maximize what they can get from you. Mr Money Mustache has the basic idea - don't shop! But for the things you truly do need, what is the best way to haggle? Is there a market for VPN to a poor part of town to get better prices? One thing is for sure, while the concept of a list price was never 100% it has had it's heyday, and is now defiantly dead.

Some choice quotes, but it well worth reading in full:

"The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside."

"Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us."

"“Many moons ago, there used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the simplest of questions—what’s the true price of pumpkin-pie spice?—is subject to a Heisenberg level of uncertainty"

"By the mid-2000s, some economists began wondering whether Big Data could discern every individual’s own personal demand curve—thereby turning the classroom hypothetical of “perfect price discrimination” (a price that’s calibrated precisely to the maximum that you will pay) into an actual possibility."

"It’s not that consumers hadn’t benefited from the lower prices available online. They had. But some of the deals weren’t nearly as good as they seemed to be. And for some people, glee began to give way to a vague suspicion that maybe they were getting ripped off. In 2007, a California man named Marc Ecenbarger thought he had scored when he found a patio set—list price $999—selling on Overstock.com for $449.99. He bought two, unpacked them, then discovered—courtesy of a price tag left on the packaging—that Walmart’s normal price for the set was $247. His fury was profound. He complained to Overstock, which offered to refund him the cost of the furniture. But his experience was later used as evidence in a case brought by consumer-protection attorneys against Overstock for false advertising, along with internal emails in which an Overstock employee claimed it was commonly known that list prices were “egregiously overstated.”"

"A website called camelcamelcamel.com even tracks Amazon prices for specific products and alerts consumers when a price drops below a preset threshold. The price history for any given item—Classic Twister, for example—looks almost exactly like a stock chart."

"The complexity of retail pricing today has driven at least one of Boomerang’s clients into game theory—a branch of mathematics that, it’s safe to say, has seldom found practical use in shopping aisles. Hariharan says, with a smile: “It lets you say, ‘What is the dominant competitor’s reaction to me? And if I know the reaction to me, what is my first, best move?’ Which is the Nash equilibrium.” Yes, that’s John Nash, the eponymous Beautiful Mind, whose brilliant contributions to mathematics now extend to the setting of mop prices".

"This struck me as sensible in the extreme. And how did she shop for herself? “I do not shop,” Patten said. In what sense?, I asked, confused.“I just gave up,” she said. “I just stopped shopping.”" (This is from Bonnie Patten of TruthinAdvertising.org, Patten thinks it is just too much work to play the game.)"I thought about this after we hung up. Maybe it was a function of her job, which let her see too much. Maybe she was a certain type—“survival shopper” was the label she used—who simply didn’t experience the thrill of finding a pair of $30 moccasins for $8. Such thoughts helped stay the alternative explanation, the one Gabriel Tarde called “the madness of doubt”: that there’s a finite amount of uncertainty we can absorb, a limit to how much we can check the ticker to see whether the Swiffer’s price is up or down this morning; that somewhere in us is a shut-off point, and that Patten had hit it."