There’s this chain of clothing stores called American Rag Cie, that I stop in every now and then to get ideas. I never buy anything there however, because its too expensive. When I went in over the weekend, I compared the prices of a couple of items, a pair of limited edition Adidas’s that Finch owns, and a 2K t-shirt that I own. The mark-up was on the Tee was 30% of what I paid, and the shoes were marked up by 20%. I’m trying to figure out if they’ve priced everything higher because their customers are used to plopping down lots of money for the one-stop hipster shopping. The cool hunter’s surcharge, perhaps?
Well, it’s just typically price discrimination, the holy grail of businesses to charge each customer the maximum of what they’re willing to pay. Technically, it’s just supply and demand in action, but people feel cheated. Like that time Amazon started charging people with accounts hiring rates than people without accounts. Uproar!
My favorite part of all this is the MBAs’ name for price discrimination. I just read that they call it “value pricing”. 🙂