With the rise of online price comparison shopping, many sellers have come to appreciate that consumers will purchase a product or service at the lowest possible price offered, with little tolerance to pay a higher price among similarly situated substitutions. Perhaps this has always been the case, but the ubiquity of consumer access to pricing has bludgeoned the ability of some sellers to charge a higher price than other available peer sellers providing the same stuff.
I invoke the Newtonian principle that “for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction” to assert that when one source of profit (say, charging higher prices than another nearby) is thwarted, something else gets monetized elsewhere.
If you look at businesses that sell items costing more than a few hundreds or more, the rise of what I’ll call “sticker price parity” has led to these companies to offer in-house financing options … Read the rest of this article!