It drives me crazy when prices of some products changes multiple times in just several minutes span … I’m curious about your experience with buying stuff/planning holidays before dynamic pricing became a common thing.
For holidays: You decided where you wanted to go and when, then you called a telephone number or went to a local travel agency, they told you the price, and you paid them. Usually you’d either send in a cheque or hand over a cheque, which took a few days to clear, and then they’d send you your tickets by post. If you were really advanced you might shop around a little bit, but most of the time you’d end up with the same price, so most of us didn’t bother.
That sounds like a great experience, maybe not the fastest way to get a ticket, but at least prices were not hiked up like they are now
Oh the prices were hiked. Just everyone hiked them the same amount and they knew you were not going to find another better price. Said another way, just because the prices were fixed didn’t often result in savings for the customer…
Prices on average were higher, but you also always knew roughly how much stuff costs. Now the same vacation can be either really cheap or ridiculously expensive or anything in-between so you have to spend a lot of time reaearching and looking around for a deal.
By the same token, not all travel agencies were created equal. My folks arranged for us to go on our first cruise way back in the 90’s. So we went to a travel agency, the woman sweet talked my folks into a “lovely” room - lower levels, inner room with NO windows as we discovered later. My parents had a room with two twin beds, and so did my brother and I. The rooms did not connect together, nor was it “cozy” - it was literally two twin beds side by side, with a nightstand in between. Then there was a TV on a shelf, and a door to the bathroom next to the door to the hallway.
The travel agent also told us this was a brand new ship (Norwegian cruise lines, it was the smallest ship in their fleet) and it had an arcade for my brother and I to enjoy. Except when we got to the ship, the room was labeled “employees only” - and there was essentially nothing on the ship to do for two young boys - no video games, no game boys, nothing. Oh and they only had like four movies playing in repeat on the televisions in the bedrooms - Ace Ventura Pet detective and “father of the bride 2” were two of the movies I distinctly remember because I saw them enough times on that ship to never want to see them ever again
Later we found out that travel agents got all sorts of perks/kickbacks like free room upgrades, or welcome fruit baskets, etc. And they could choose to gift them to their clients… or some agents would keep all those perks for themselves and splurge on a premium cruise vacation for their families.
Go figure my father (who is a real life bad-luck-brian) picked the absolute worst travel agent in our small town who pushed us into a trip on the smallest/worst cruise ship in the fleet for a family with two young boys.
If you were really advanced you might shop around a little bit, but most of the time you’d end up with the same price, so most of us didn’t bother.
Before it was really easy to shop around, you might make a couple of phone calls to get a handful of competing prices. But sellers were often not selling the exact same products and services, so you would have to do some calculations on the differences in order to make your choice.
That really only happened for higher-priced things, though. For everyday stuff, you would know who had it locally, go there, pay whatever they were asking, and take it home. The time and effort you had to spend in order to find exactly the right thing at exactly the right price wasn’t worth it for lower-priced things.
every store had a layaway program…
That’s an entirely new concept to me. Where does this happen outside the stock market?
plane tickets,hotels,online stores, almost everywhere where prices can be controlled automatically
Okay, interesting. I don’t fly, I don’t book hotel rooms, but I do buy stuff online and I haven’t seen this ever. Weird.
You may not be aware of that, but based on your location (eg. Germany), some stores can charge you more. When some stores record higher demand for a product, they can drastically increase the price within minutes. You may be not aware of that, but under the hood this stuff happens quite often. It drives me crazy when buying last minute ticket/hotel cost fortune …
Isn’t this minimized by using something like geizhals and idealo? You can see the price history there. It happened sometimes that I added a product to my wishlist and after a few days it was 20-30€ cheaper on Amazon. If I want to buy something, I usually add it to a wishlist and wait around 1 week to see how the price changes. If it goes down a lot, I jump on it.
That is a smart strategy, I will use that
You’re not really supposed to notice, but it definitely happens. Biggest offender for normal retail stuff is Amazon. Put an Amazon url into a price tracker like camelcamelcamel and you’ll see a huge amount of variation for most products.
I’m aware that prices can vary from day to day, but wild changes up and down within minutes is news to me.
Check the price of something, like airline travel, turn on incognito mode in your browser and do it again, now turn on a VPN, switch your location to some place like the US and check the prices again.
They’ll likely be different all three times, especially if you had been looking at airline prices for a while.
Happens at gas stations. Prices will be higher in wealthier areas. I drive for a delivery service so I see it all the time. Even within the same company’s gas stations.
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At the end of the day, you mostly just ended up paying full retail price for everything.
Unless you got a flyer/ad in the mail that listed out specific deals for things, you didn’t really have any visibility into pricing outside of the physical locations you could visit, or what someone might tell you over the phone. So, shopping by price was much more labor intensive than it is now. Most of the time, if you wanted to find out the price of something you would have to physically drive to that location and see what they had and what it cost.
It also wasn’t super long ago that the concept of stores like Wal-mart or Target did not exist. So, aside from it being difficult to compare prices, you also just didn’t really have a lot of options for finding products at different locations. Maybe groceries allowed for this as most people had at least a couple grocery stores within a reasonable distance. But outside of that, you generally had to travel to specific stores, and there might only be one store near you that carried what you wanted. So, if you wanted toys or video games, you went to Toys R Us, because that was the only place that had a decent selection of those things. And when you went there, you paid whatever the retail price was for the thing you wanted.
Edit: So to summarize, it used to be that finding the thing you wanted was the hard part, whereas now it’s more about finding the right price for the thing you want.
