Something I’ve noticed while shopping at regular ol’ stores is that prices vary depending on where you are. Not a big deal. It’s nothing new. If I buy something at the Target right by my house, it might be a little cheaper than the Target up the road a bit. But things get weird when it happens at the same location – and by the same location I mean Amazon.
A while back I tossed a pair of shoes in my Amazon cart but didn’t buy them right away. After a couple of days, the price started changing. It went down about 50 cents. I came back the next day and the price had gone down about $2. The day after that, it dropped a full $10! This continued for a good couple of weeks – again, I still hadn’t bought the shoes – before the price began to go up. First by $5, then another $1, then another $5 until it got to a point where it was more expensive than it was when I first put it in my cart.
This happened again with another item I was keeping an eye on just a month ago: small pricing changes on a daily basis, and then a huge jump (in this case the price doubled), before the pricing started to change again. Incidentally, these all were things sold by Amazon and not a 3rd party. As a result of this weirdness, I’ve put a number of things in my cart and not purchased them just to see this happen. It even happens with items in the Save for Later category, and it definitely feels like a weird quasi-human interaction that a computer is trying to figure out.
I essentially said to Amazon, “Hey. I think I want these shoes. Is the price firm?” and without me doing anything, Amazon started to figure out what price I would actually buy them at. It’s a weird new form of negotiation. It’s going to be awful when Amazon is trying to figure out what I’ll pay for an avocado.
(I’ll save them the time: 50 cents or less.)
Posted in Shopping, Technology
