San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

Pharmaceuticals lobbying hard to get the UK to stop buying drugs on the national level (where they have enormous pricing power) and make hospitals responsible for buying drugs. This would be terrible for the UK.

The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument.

    "How much does this candy bar cost?"
    "Well, you social credit profile says you payed $700 for pair of shoes last week so... twelve grand."
    "But the guy in front of me just paid 35 cents for the same candy bar."
    "Well, I mean, *he* is white."

> But where's the argument?

Looking to big pharma for guidance is depressingly hilarious.

E.g. If a seller knows I've been searching for flu remedies, I've made a social media post related to the illness. Then I go to the pharmacy and everything related to alleviating those symptoms is more expensive for me.

Put simply, if they know you absolutely need something, they will leverage that information.

There are two ways to legally "earn" money. The first is to provide a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price.

The other is extractive — to find a way to exploit the customer with limited choices and extract the maximum value from them. Monopoly pricing is the primary example — people need electricity, housing, food, etc. and if someone corners those markets, or colludes, they can extract a far higher amount of money from people than they would willingly spend in an actually free market of multiple competitors and fully available information (wherein another competitor would offer prices closer to the cost of production and take the business from the overpriced competitor).

Production of value is the essence of the value of capitalism. Extracting value by coercion is fundamentally corrupt, and at the extreme end is nothing more than mob rule ("nice store windows you got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them; pay us for protection").

Surveillance pricing is simply a fundamentally dishonest form of the latter, exploiting massive amounts of information on customers to extract more money from a person than they would be freely willing to pay for a product, because you found a temporary or permanent vulnerability and 'have them over a barrel'.

A society that permits surveillance pricing will inevitably become more impoverished because the few players doing surveillance pricing will extract more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value. This impairs everyone else's ability to provide value.

Allowing it is fundamentally stupid and self-destructive.

We already see the results of this in the US in the medical and educational systems, where planning is nearly impossible because the price is hidden until purchase (or even afterward) and the other side is trying to price it at "whatever you have". Unsurprisingly, both of those have absurd debt loads and are causing society-wide discontent/destabilization.

Now imagine that grocers can individually price to you, and you find out what you owe (and whether you need to put some items back) at the register, and this information about you is available to be purchased by anyone so all available grocers have that same knowledge. What are you going to do?