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If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

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Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#111

Post by Splines »

bmastenbrook wrote: post #108
lucasjung wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I love about price discrimination is that sometimes you have to think through a few steps to figure out who the target demographics are, which makes it a sort of game for me. Sometimes it's obvious (senior discounts), but often it's a little more indirect. One of my favorites: I drive a diesel, and every Monday Shell sells their diesel at a discount of $0.10/gal. I figure that they're trying to discriminate betw…

The weekly diesel discount might also be a good way of attracting loyal customers from local businesses who operate diesel vehicles.

Here's a thought: Could it be a form of weak lock-in? If you fill your tank on Monday, then you're less likely to fill up at that cheaper gas station on Thursday. When the next Monday comes around, you're probably going to need to fill up again, and well, there they are :)

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#112

Post by mquander »

jrockway wrote: post #89
bendotc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people usually ask you to produce your wallet at the beginning of a meal when you eat at a restaurant? By ordering off the menu, you agree to the price on it. Similarly, when you sign an agreement to pay someone for work done, one would hope you'll pay that person when the work is done. Sadly, reality teaches us that this is not always the case.

No, I'm just saying it's weird. People tried this (+) with houses and it didn't work very well. Why meals? (+) this == "You saw the price and consumed the product, now it's time to pay." "But I don't have any money." "Oh fuck. I'm fucked, not you, even though you're the asshole."

If you have to pay the money up front, you're less likely to buy; that's true for houses because they cost so much, and it's true for meals because there are lots of small individual charges in the course of a full meal. I guess restaurants find that the money lost via dine-and-dashing is not as bad as the money lost to misers.

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#113

Post by bmelton »

ecuzzillo wrote: post #50

You can order a filet for a fairly predictable price, it will take a fairly predictable amount of time, and it will fairly predictably make you happy. Software, by and large, does not make people happy or do what they want nearly as reliably as steak does, and so if I were them I would be much more finicky about paying people to make it for me than I am about paying people to make me steak. And especially, software m…

The obvious counterpoint to that is that there is no give and take in the preparation of a filet.

The success of a development project, or software implementation depends just as much on involvement from the customer as it does for the developer or provider.

In the enterprise, this means setting up a project consisting of stakeholders from which you can gather information, get integration assistance, etc. In the single-project bespoke software or web development arena, it's even more important that the customer is able to provide good feedback, offer and direct according to their vision, etc.

Back to the steak analogy, what would be the remediation for the customer yelling "More salt! More salt!" and then refusing to pay when the final product is too salty?

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#114

Post by ajscherer »

jrockway wrote: post #89
bendotc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people usually ask you to produce your wallet at the beginning of a meal when you eat at a restaurant? By ordering off the menu, you agree to the price on it. Similarly, when you sign an agreement to pay someone for work done, one would hope you'll pay that person when the work is done. Sadly, reality teaches us that this is not always the case.

No, I'm just saying it's weird. People tried this (+) with houses and it didn't work very well. Why meals? (+) this == "You saw the price and consumed the product, now it's time to pay." "But I don't have any money." "Oh fuck. I'm fucked, not you, even though you're the asshole."

There are substantial differences between the resturant and housing situations. Short of burning it down for fun there isn't really any way to consume a house. Also, the person who sold the house got paid for it, its the person who loaned the money to the buyer who is fucked. It would be more like if you took out a loan from a bank, used it to go out to eat, then couldn't pay back the bank. Maybe you are an asshole for not being able to pay, but the bank is incompetent for thinking you would be able to.

Anyway, as far as I can tell resturants are all about experience, and maybe forcing the customer to prove they can pay would degrade the experience to the point where the resturant makes more money by just accepting the occasional dine & dash.

Also in a real resturant if a customer was sitting there baldly refusing to pay, you could probably just call the police (I dont know, I've worked in resturants and have never even heard of this happening).

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#115

Post by philwelch »

vacri wrote: post #73
michael_dorfman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* I can assure you that doctors (well, dentists) do not charge on a fixed-symptom basis.* Interestingly, under the Medicare reimbursement system, that's pretty much exactly how they are paid (if the patient is a Medicare patient).

Are you honestly saying that if you go to your local bulk-billing doctor with a stubborn symptom that won't go away, necessitating multiple visits, that the doctor will only ever be paid for the first consultation? That the rest are all (metaphorically) 'bug-fixes that are included in the original fixed-price spec'? Ain't so. Doctors get paid for their time, Medicare just has the government pay for it instead of the…

You and michael_dorfman are probably talking past each other, on account of being from different countries with different "Medicare" systems. The US, Australia and Canada all have systems called "Medicare".

In the US, Medicare is only for old people, and it's uncommon for them to attend university. Also, "uni" isn't a usual American colloquialism. So it appears that michael_dorfman is talking about US Medicare, and you're probably talking about Australian Medicare.

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#116

Post by kreilly »

lionhearted wrote: post #99
yummyfajitas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a little aesthetic knowledge so you don't look ridiculous, but everyone should probably learn a little basic aesthetics anyways - it's one of those areas that a tiny bit of knowledge pays huge dividends. Very true, but how does one go about gaining this knowledge?

Here's a few suggestions, in ascending order of subjective difficulty to the average HN user: Smashing Magazine (which doubles as good for web design). Study the color wheel, read analyses of ways to use it. Fashion websites. Go to lots of museums. Go to art galleries. Flip through 2-3 fashion magazines per month at the bookstore. Read book(s) on how to dress for different functions. Go to high end stores and try thi…

Or you can look at all the time you'd spend doing all this, figure out the opportunity cost and simply pay full price for the pants.

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#117

Post by metageek »

lionhearted wrote: post #71
cubicle67 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bargain for almost everything (much to my wife's embarrassment :). One thing I've found, is that if you can't get them to reduce the price, you can often get extras thrown in. I recently bought a fairly expensive coffee machine (a real one, not one of those electronic ones); supplier wouldn't budge on price, but I did manage to get $400 credited to my account, 2x barrista training vouchers worth $150 each, and a fe…

Great comment. > * Some stock is in constant demand, and you'll almost never get a discount. Black mens trousers, for example. The flipside is, if you're a guy and you're willing to wear light blue, pink, purple, and yellow, you can get some seriously great buys. You can get very high quality clothes in those colors for dirt cheap sometimes, which is why around half of my wardrobe is bright. It takes a little aesthet…

It also helps to know fabric. 10-15 years back, my wife wrote an article, "Fabric for Bachelors":

http://www.virtue.to/fabric/

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#118

Post by rmc »

eftpotrm wrote: post #101
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend worked on a documentary about a major UK supermarket a while back. Talking to them off camera they admitted that their budget range chickens and their regular chickens where identical save the packaging.

I'm not entirely surprised but I don't see where's the incentive for them to behave like this. They double the lines they must carry and are surely to some degree both undercutting themselves and overcharging so reducing sales. Surely they could achieve better results with a mid-range pricing and labelling?

* I don't see where's the incentive for them to behave like this.*

They almost certainly get more money.

They are selling the budget chickens to the budget customers at a profit. They are getting the same chickens at a larger profit to other people.

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#119

Post by WildUtah »

merijnv wrote: post #76
Timothee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White goods are washing machines, dish washers, fridges…, while brown goods are the audio/video stuff (TVs, stereo). Kind of old fashion but based on the typical color of these items (mostly from a couple of decades or more ago: washing machines and fridges are in many colors and A/V stuff is almost always black and/or silver) According to Wikipedia, it seems to be mostly a UK idiom.

This idiom appears exactly the same in Dutch (and thus possibly other languages too?)

Línea blanca in Spanish

Re: If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming

#120

Post by joelhaus »

jrockway wrote: post #89
bendotc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying people usually ask you to produce your wallet at the beginning of a meal when you eat at a restaurant? By ordering off the menu, you agree to the price on it. Similarly, when you sign an agreement to pay someone for work done, one would hope you'll pay that person when the work is done. Sadly, reality teaches us that this is not always the case.

No, I'm just saying it's weird. People tried this (+) with houses and it didn't work very well. Why meals? (+) this == "You saw the price and consumed the product, now it's time to pay." "But I don't have any money." "Oh fuck. I'm fucked, not you, even though you're the asshole."

That is an interesting insight. I wonder how restaurateurs project customer default rates when analyzing new opportunities? They must teach this in hospitality management schools...

Regarding the housing comparison, the nature of the credit, the goods exchanged and the fact that maturities are so much shorter in restaurants (1:8)[1], allows (requires) restaurants to engage in riskier business practices. Mortgage lending risks are obviously much more complicated, but you are correct to point out that risk is an inherent part of issuing credit.

[1] Assumes 3 hours credit issued to the average customer, with average inventory borrowed for 30 days.

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