This is a Ranting Goat piece about price-gouging. If you want to read about this..
.. you are going to be disappointed.
Price-gouging in the narrow sense relates to profiteering in emergencies and it is illegal in 37 US states, though not in the UK. But it is also becoming a general term for the increasingly universal trend of consumers being ripped off. Let’s look at a few examples:
dynamic pricing
This hit the news recently when Oasis fans found tickets for the re-union gigs next year had more than doubled in price when they reached the front of the queue. Liam Gallagher was predictably unperturbed by the backlash, replying to one fan asking the aging Mancunian if he had any “spare tickets”: “shit loads but there really expensive 100 thousand pounds Kneeling only.”1
The supposedly saintly Bruce Springsteen pulled the same stunt in 2023 - some tickets to see “the Boss” cost up to £4,000. Springsteen replied that typically his concert tickets re-sell for way over the face value. "The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money. I’m going, 'Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?'
He sort of has a point. The fact is that some people are able and willing to pay very high amounts to see certain artists perform - normal laws of competition don’t apply. Bruce Springsteen has a monopoly in Bruce Springsteen concerts. And substitutability of product does not really apply either. Go and see Tom Petty instead? Or Bruce Juice, a tribute band? No, Tom is not the boss, he’s a middle-manager at best. It won’t be the experience of a lifetime, maybe not even the experience of the day.
Bruce Juice - something worse
Bruce (Springsteen, not Juice) has you over a barrel. But his most die-hard fans may not be able to afford those tickets without making serious sacrifices. Is that what Bruce wants? How far is he willing to go? A kidney for a backstage pass? The reality is that he will be playing his shows to a few rich old blokes, obsessed/addicted fans who have made life-changing sacrifices to see him, plus the usual bunch of freeloading politicians and corporate shits from hedge funds, private equity, investment banks and large companies, who barely know who Springsteen is but got “gifted” the tickets and will absolutely not extend any favours to the people they got them from. Absolutely not.
Is that what Bruce wants, selling out to the highest bidders, playing to a bunch of entitled plutocrats checking their texts and emails plus lifelong fans that he has newly impoverished? Bruce said: “Well, I’m old… You certainly don’t like to be the poster boy for high ticket prices. But that’s how it went. You have to own the decisions you have made and go out and just continue to do your best.”
inertia pricing
Customer loyalty is now a weakness, not a strength, something to be exploited and abused. You may remember the “brand new customers only” Nationwide advert a few years ago when this was still a relatively new concept. Now almost purveyors of intangible services will try and stiff their existing customers with above-inflation price increases.
They divide into two camps:
companies who quote massive increases (e.g. phone and broadband providers and insurance companies), expecting most customers to ring up and complain and threaten to go somewhere else, with staff then authorised to offer significant discounts back down to the price they should have increased to. It penalises people who are too lazy or inattentive to do anything about it, but also penalises vulnerable or trusting people who do not realise that they are subject to a “see if I can get away with it” premium. It’s not quite theft, but it’s a close relation
service providers who know it will be a bit of a pain for customers to move - e.g private schools, IT companies or professional services firms. Prices tend to rise above inflation and be more than customers expected. It may be why services inflation, even now, has increased to 5.6% per annum despite the general measure of inflation holding steady at 2.2%.
Some time ago a private school informed parents of the latest increase in its fees, but the letter said “per anum” by mistake. One parent replied that he preferred to continue paying through the nose as usual. Whichever orifice you are required to pay out of, it’s painful.
ratchet pricing - the pandemic and the Ukraine invasion caused massive global supply chain shocks which triggered large price increases, especially for energy.
Take a look at this graph showing the monthly natural gas price index from August 2022 to now (893 to 164 over the two year period, a decrease of 82%).
Remember how your energy prices shot up in 2022, and how so many other prices increased (e.g. restaurant and pub pricing) because of “increased energy prices”. Note how those prices have now reverted to a much lower level as energy prices have fallen dramatically again. What, they haven’t?
This is the effect of ratchet pricing - suppliers take advantage of supply chain price increases to justify increased prices to consumers, but never reduce those prices again. Where markets are supposedly ultra-competitive, such as for fuel and groceries, there are occasional downward adjustments, though never as prompt or dramatic as the increases.
deterioration in product and service quality - there are several variants here:
shrinkflation - products getting smaller, sometimes boasting “reduced salt content” or “reduced sugar content”, rather than the less misleading “reduced content”
skimpflation - most commonly, this term relates to manufactured food products where the key, usually most expensive, ingredient now makes up a smaller percentage of the whole - these examples are so widespread that it may be harder to find a product where this has not happened. But it also applies to a general deterioration in service quality - fewer ancillary services provided to customers, or else services being stripped out and re-appearing as add-ons to be paid for. An obvious example is in airline pricing, where check-in bags now often cost more than passengers on short haul flights and where a few years ago someone had the genius idea that a family could be induced to pay extra rather than have their children scattered around the plane. BA now charges customers £50 per flight per person to choose their seats. Coming next, the “ear-flicking waiver fee” where passengers pay a supplement to not have their ears flicked continually during the flight.
enshittification - this is a thing if you haven’t heard of it before, with its own Wikipedia entry and everything, defining it as “a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders”. Fortunately for you, the Bleating Goat is still at the high-quality offering stage.
junk fees - Joe Biden announced last year that he (or maybe it was Putin) was going to crack down on junk fees which cost Americans tens of billions of dollars a year. A junk fee is an unexpected and sometimes hidden fee a company charges consumers for a service that often costs them little to provide. If you live in America or have spent any time there you will be familiar with service fees, processing fees, administrative fees, delivery fees, convenience fees, handling fees. And taxes. And taxes on the fees. You will also see resort fees, living wage fees, late payment fees and termination fees. In the UK banks have for years been charging mysterious and unjustified fees but we are gradually seeing them leach out from the financial services sector into other areas, including concert ticket prices (again). Given they are fixed as a percentage of the already inflated base price that makes them doubly expensive and annoying.
profit maximization pricing - all big businesses and most smaller ones are now relentlessly focused on profit maximization. How can we deliver less for more? How much more can we wring out of our customers? How much more can we degrade our service and product to save costs, and still get away with it? There’s no point customers going anywhere else because all our competitors are doing the same thing.
There are still a few good guys out there - people who define their self-worth and derive happiness from providing a good service to their customers, rather than purely growing the bottom line. Unfortunately they are a dying breed - they are dinosaurs.
I don’t have a ready solution because increasing exploitation of the consumer seems to be an inexorable symptom of our late-capitalist malaise. The rich and powerful have always farmed and exploited the rest of us, but after a a half-century or so of relative equality and empowerment we are now being farmed more intensively again. Will we meekly accept it with the occasional grumble at the pub or the barbecue, or on social media and Substack blogs? Or, as Howard Beale did in Network, are we going to stand up and say “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”?
Having seen Oasis in Prague in 1997 I can assure anyone priced out that they have dodged an expensive bullet - Liam gave one of the most low energy performances I’ve ever seen, even lying down on the stage at one point during one of Noel’s interminable self-indulgent guitar solos