I managed to cancel my dad's after he died. They STILL tried to upsell me! One of my favorite phrases ever uttered: "He's dead, you asshole, he doesn't need more channels!" And that actually did it. Felt sorry for the salesperson, who didn't have much of a choice in the matter...
Surely by making it difficult to cancel they’re really just making it easier for people to get discounts. If I were a Comcast customer I’d be calling up to cancel every few months.
To be fair, internets would have been equally outraged if there wasn't such requirement, because sure as hell somebody would have found an exploit and cancelled a bunch of account, just for funzies
I'd take a 10 hour train trip from Chicago to LA in a heartbeat.
Security lines are shorter, and the beginning and end of a train trip both happen at a literal train station, so it's usually easier to get into and out of the city center.
Security lines are shorter than airports now because public is not relying on trains in the US for travel as much as airplanes yet, if that happens what makes you think there won't be TSA all over train stations making you take your shoes off before boarding?
You can't do that anymore with commercial aircraft either, since they started looking the cockpit door, yet we still act like every passenger is likely to try it.
Sure you can't do that exact thing but who would have thought of flying planes into skyscrapers before 9/11 except a few crazies anyway? We didn't exactly have a pandemic of people flying planes into skyscrapers for decades prior.
Sure you can't do that exact thing but who would have thought of flying planes into skyscrapers before 9/11 except a few crazies anyway?
Tom Clancy? In ‘Debt of Honor’ it’s a major plot-point after all. The issue here is not that making a train into a cruise missile is hard to imagine, it’s actually impossible. You can attack the train, or use the train to attack a station or something close to the tracks, and that’s it. It’s also a purely kinetic event, rather than adding the complexity of so much fuel.
Why should the market price be $300? If it only costs $12.53 to manufacture, someone could sell epipen equivalents for much less than $300 and capture the whole market.
Suppose there are only two competitors and the barrier to entry for a third is high. You profit $287.47 per unit with partial market share. If you try to charge $200 so you only make $187.47 per unit, your competitor will also lower the price to $200 and you will both end up with the same market share but less profit. Even if the two participants in the market never communicate, the obvious strategy in a two-player game is keep the high price.
This works when there are two people (who can maybe even use the same golf resorts), but it’s impractical when there are 10 or more since anyone has a temporary advantage to defect. That’s how free markets are supposed to work and I think people might expect that to happen here. It’s just that, as you noted, with only two particiants allowed in the market, forming a cartel is trivial.
That's true because it's not trivial to launch a new drug/delivery system. Even generics have to prove that their drug matches the kinetics of the patent drug and has other similar properties. There is still an FDA process to approving a new drug, and if I'm not mistaken, the new delivery device also has to have it's own approval through the FDA medical devices division.
All of that is before you even take into account how much it costs to re-tool your production line to make something different. Sure, you could lower the barriers to entry until they're barely existent and offer almost no consumer protection, but I'm not really sure we want to make it so easy that a company will spin up a production line to make a drug for 6 months while they think they can undercut the competition.
Then again, I'm a big pharma biologist, so I probably am a bit biased toward safety and large, slow movements.
A solution to this particular problem could be to make the patents on the existing, known to be safe methods expire earlier, so that in order to retain a monopoly on something big pharma must make a significant patentable improvement.
Critics of this policy say that it would disincentive new drug development. That may be true, but for many people it doesn’t matter because they can’t afford them at current monopoly rates anyways, and our insurance industry is broken for them.
I wonder how you would go about researching a better patent-expiration scheme and the effects it would have.
Edit: maybe I misunderstood you- are you saying even with no patent protection, the barrier to entry is still high enough to disincentivize new entrants because of safety regulation and retooling costs? So patents aren’t the only roadblock, or not even necessarily the main roadblock?
I mean what you say in your edit. Even off-patent drugs require basic proof that they are what they claim to be, are similar to the patent drug in important ways, have a safe formulation, require a company to make a production line for it, and even require some marketing in many cases to make sure people know there's a new manufacturer of that drug.
I've never worked in generics, so I'm certainly not an expert, but I am saying both that we need some of the safety and quality controls by the FDA (or some system to replace them without relying on companies' good will) and that there are big hurdles even disregarding the FDA or other regulatory bodies.
”Even if the two participants in the market never communicate”
But you can’t get at identical prices without communication between parties. Without communication, initial price setting is as if both companies make a bid in a sealed envelope.
It would be highly unlikely that both bids would be identical, and the lowest bidder with a price above $12.53 makes all the profit.
The two participants didn't appear at the same time. When the first participant appeared and set the original price, that price became an obvious Schelling point.
No, it's more like this: I'm the CEO of a medical drug supply company. I want a new yacht, or a new Jetstream private plane, or hell--why choose between them when I can get both? What price should I charge for a drug millions of people need each year so that I can continue to enable my decadent lifestyle?
If the historical price is X, but I can charge 4X because people need the drug, let's charge 5X so I can make even more profit because demand is inelastic.
And the bad PR of news reports of people dying because they can’t afford our lifesaving products can be addressed by issuing a press release announcing price cuts and a coupon program which will both be ended after the public moral outrage dies down.
One should be hesitant to proclaim knowledge of the optimal strategy without knowing all the details. Whether or not the default strategy is to cooperate or betray is sensitive to the precise weights of the rewards for each combination of decisions, as well as the number of times the game is played. For example, in the simple version of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat: the default is to cooperate, and only betray in exchange for being betrayed.
I mean, that really isn't the default strategy. As Adam Smith recognized in Wealth of Nations, the default strategy is always to collude:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
> As Adam Smith recognized in Wealth of Nations, the default strategy is always to collude:
That's a misreading of Smith's point, but it's also irrelevant here, because it's quite a leap to assert that "the default strategy is to engage in blatantly illegal activity".
If it were not the favorable strategy, it wouldn't have to be illegal, because it would not be popular enough to hurt consumers. People habitually favor optimizing for short-term success because there is no long-term if you don't survive the short-term. Furthermore, it is actually repeated interaction that makes collusion/cooperation better than betraying, because of the opportunity to get punished on subsequent iterations. It is this medium-term thinking that pushes collusion (but not too much of it) into a position of dominance. In the truly long term, nothing is stable because we're all dead anyway.
That's only default for actors that are dumb. Most humans are smart enough to take advantage of an obviously better strategy that also doesn't really require coordination.
technically yes, that is the default strategy in perfectly competitive markets, but collusion happens because it maximizes profit for both companies despite it being anti-capitalist.
for plausible deniability, the two companies typically don't directly talk to each other, but a lot of signalling happens via public statements and marketing channels to indicate a desire not to compete (as a simplistic example: raising prices when the competitor lowers theirs).
Honest question - does this really work? I have tried it once or twice without success. Are there particular 'magic phrases' you need to use, or is it jut a question of persistence? Does it impact your credit?
> Are there particular 'magic phrases' you need to use, or is it jut a question of persistence?
My situations varied, but when I had no insurance and was living off of savings, I found a generic "hardship" form and explained my situation to them - they waived 80% of the fee without much resistance. This is compared to the laughable discount of 2% they offered me on the spot if I paid in cash (at the moment of the visit)
In other situations, I'd imagine it's more a question of persistence, but I'd venture to say you can knock off at least 50% on _any_ hospital bill.
I recently bought a house, and my credit was 800+, so I don't think it does in any appreciable way.
That wasn't the gist of my post though. I was advocating more to resist the bullshit and to legislate something that allows the customer to replace materials instead of paying a hugely marked up item.
Same concept would be applicable, for example, for a car mechanic shop. Just because they billed me $600 for brake pads doesn't mean that they've actually provided me with a 10x markup of value on having bought brake pads myself for $60 - at some point this needs to be treated as "usury" (I don't know if there's a word for exorbitant markup on a regular good).
Another thing I would add - don't put your social security number on medical forms. I've never seen it enforced and there's no medical reason for them to have it.
I don't really understand this sentiment which seems to be widely shared here. Stripe handles all the PCI stuff. What's wrong with coding up a basic store?
Exactly. PayPal is the same way: if you outsource your payment processing to one of these, then you don't have to worry about the PCI stuff. If you're intent on having a "uniform checkout experience", then it's much more difficult of course, but if you don't mind redirecting customers to PayPal to do the payment, then making your own basic store can save you a ton of money in fees.
OP's friend needs a store quickly, and probably wants a stable, feature-rich, ready to use store. OP most likely does not want to get blind-sided discovering that the plethora of currently existing solutions have upwards of well over $1 million dollars of labor-hours (features, QA, documentation) put into them. Magento might even have over $1 billion in labor-hours. Rolling your own out of simple ignorance regarding what exists is already rather dumb, but the surprise finding out that making anything worth using is a full-time job will be soul crushing, depressing, and may even damage OP's relationship.
Writing an ecommerce CMS because you are educated on what exists and want to innovate is a completely different matter.
Catalog/pricing/inventory management
Category/multiple product display/design
Search
Single product page display/design
Shipping options
Checkout, aside from payment (partial flow, or completely externally hosted?)
Order management (how to get orders out of the system and into a warehouse to be packed)
Promotions and discounts (will you have coupons?)
Customer feedback/product reviews
Contact me/us
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Source: I work for an ecommerce consultant (I use/live in Salesforce Commerce Cloud/formerly Demandware)
