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Oh drat, it turns out the retail theft claims were promulgated by retailers in bad faith. Who could have possibly seen that coming? Gee, I wonder if those claims were used as a basis of business decisions that involved shuttering price-competitive locations through draconian anti-shrink mitigation in order to get people to shop at stores in less price-competitive areas. Who can say? Baronash posted:What on earth? This is an absolutely bizarre reading of Netflix's strategy. Netflix wasn't trying to reduce its subscriber base, it was attempting the exact opposite. They saw people who shared a password from someone else's account as potential subscribers, and tried to capture some of them by removing the ability to easily share accounts. If they were just looking for the richest subscribers, they wouldn't have spent the last several years adding multiple price tiers (including their ad-supported plan just last year) to attract subscribers in every income bracket. I don't think anyone but Netflix can speak to how successful that has been, but it clearly isn't compatible with the strategy you claim they're employing. Your view of this doesn't make sense on paper. Netflix kept ratcheting prices on the service until it was painful to them, and then after that, took the step of kicking off "free riders." You can't both raise prices and make a volume play in the market at the same time. That really doesn't make sense. People who never bothered to buy in when it was cheaper are suddenly going to buy now that it's more expensive and access is cut off? Meanwhile.. torrenting still exists. It's madness. Cutting off the free riders was investor-facing virtue signaling. Netflix was trying to ladder up the market from basic mass consumer to premium. It was the only play they had left that made sense. They'd stripped every market they could access. No growth possible for actual users. So they went after their whales. ErIog fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Dec 14, 2023 |
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Dec 14, 2023 05:45
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Netflix makes the most money off its ad-supported tier (or so it claims via ARPU) and is aggressively pushing people either towards Premium or Standard with Ads since the Standard tier is the least lucrative. People were convinced that ending password sharing would result in a mass exodus which has been proven patently false; they've seen a modest increase in UCAN where they had plateau'd previously. Also, if you think the average American has any idea how to torrent, you're nuts. Zoomers in particular have no idea how to do anything other than google "Reddit NFL streams" at this point, not that Millennials on average were using BT that much 10-15 years ago.
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Dec 18, 2023 21:41
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ErIog posted:
People who could access it via someone else’s account absolutely might decide it is worth paying for themselves once that is no longer an option. Whether the price is higher or not. So yes, you can make a volume play by making people sign up for their own account if they want to continue service while also increasing prices. You’re right that you’ll see some drop in subscribers from the increased price, so if their only goal was to have the most subscribers possible it wouldn’t make sense, but that’s not their goal and the impact from ending sharing seems to have outweighed the impact from the cost increase.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:59
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Mike_V posted:Netflix makes the most money off its ad-supported tier (or so it claims via ARPU) and is aggressively pushing people either towards Premium or Standard with Ads since the Standard tier is the least lucrative. People were convinced that ending password sharing would result in a mass exodus which has been proven patently false; they've seen a modest increase in UCAN where they had plateau'd previously. Don't most ISPs also send very scary letters to you if you're caught torrenting and you don't know how to use a VPN to hide your tracks?
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Dec 19, 2023 15:42
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Eric Cantonese posted:Don't most ISPs also send very scary letters to you if you're caught torrenting and you don't know how to use a VPN to hide your tracks? Depends. I goofed while visiting my mum a few years ago and I accidentally shared a digital game from Amazon without my VPN up. She received a 'delete it and don't do it again' letter, but that was the end of it. I think that some ISPs at least give a slap on the wrist first. That said, my mum is exactly the sort of person who would never know how or need to use such a thing as a VPN. They just upgraded her internet, for free, to 800mbps, which is more than I have. In my mum's case, that's like giving a pensioner a Lamborghini to drive to Tesco to buy fruit.
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Dec 19, 2023 17:56
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Your ISP ultimately wants your money, so as long as they have the flimsy excuse of a VPN they don't want the problem. The same is true if you don't so it's normally a few strikes before anything really happens when you get caught.
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Dec 19, 2023 18:23
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Eric Cantonese posted:Don't most ISPs also send very scary letters to you if you're caught torrenting and you don't know how to use a VPN to hide your tracks? Ime you only get nastygrams if you torrent poo poo that a major company currently cares about, eg big name, ongoing shows, movies recently added to streaming. You can torrent obscure black metal and 80s movies all the live long day without anyone caring, VPN or no.
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Dec 19, 2023 18:42
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Normies should just use a debrid service and you get all the content with none of the risk.
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Dec 19, 2023 18:45
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ErIog posted:Your view of this doesn't make sense on paper. Netflix kept ratcheting prices on the service until it was painful to them, and then after that, took the step of kicking off "free riders." You can't both raise prices and make a volume play in the market at the same time. That really doesn't make sense. People who never bothered to buy in when it was cheaper are suddenly going to buy now that it's more expensive and access is cut off? Meanwhile.. torrenting still exists. It's madness. Well done ignoring the post you quoted, I guess. They spent the last few years adding price tiers, including the ad-supported one with the intent of grabbing customers who otherwise would find their service too expensive. This is the exact opposite of what you're claiming. If they were trying to get rid of their lower-income customers, they wouldn't have introduced that ad-supported tier just last year.
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Dec 19, 2023 21:00
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DR FRASIER KRANG posted:Normies should just use a debrid service and you get all the content with none of the risk. I use a delibird
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Dec 19, 2023 22:25
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DR FRASIER KRANG posted:Normies should just use a debrid service and you get all the content with none of the risk. Normies are just going to pay for a streaming service. Unless you can make it that easy it's still nerd poo poo, nerd
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Dec 19, 2023 22:38
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HootTheOwl posted:I use a delibird Yeah, it's super effective.
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Dec 26, 2023 02:59
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Jaxyon posted:Sure, but not equally bad, and Shoplifting from a major chain is almost not bad at all. If it’s a chain it’s fair game baby.
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Dec 26, 2023 20:30
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Safeway has started going through ridiculous measures to combat shoplifting when the most obvious solution would be to stop gouging people with their insane regular pricing, which continues to push far beyond the rate of inflation and well into low orbit. It's a moral good to rip off the people selling you chips for seven dollars a bag and pasta sauce for 12 dollars a jar. It's a loving joke and all you have to do to see how scummy they are is go across town to WinCo to see exactly how much they are loving you on markup. Too bad if you're in an area that only has Safeway though! V absolutely, but at least in the past you might have a Safeway and an Albertsons competing with sale prices and such. Wonder what happened to that dynamic??? They've really taken the gouging to an extreme while blaming the pandemic/shoplifting/etc V Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 20:54
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I feel like Safeway has always gouged. When I was a kid it was a running thing "We're not shopping at Safeway, the prices are insane"
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Dec 26, 2023 21:06
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Professor Beetus posted:Safeway has started going through ridiculous measures to combat shoplifting when the most obvious solution would be to stop gouging people with their insane regular pricing, which continues to push far beyond the rate of inflation and well into low orbit. It's a moral good to rip off the people selling you chips for seven dollars a bag and pasta sauce for 12 dollars a jar. It's a loving joke and all you have to do to see how scummy they are is go across town to WinCo to see exactly how much they are loving you on markup. Too bad if you're in an area that only has Safeway though! You can counteract this by making mistakes at the self-checkout.
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Dec 26, 2023 21:08
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withak posted:You can counteract this by making mistakes at the self-checkout. I am particularly error-prone when near the self-scan. Some might conjecture that the 40% increase in the prices of staple foods in my diet over the last few years has something to do with that, but I'm fairly certain I'm just made clumsy by the giddiness of living in such 'free' countries.
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Dec 26, 2023 21:41
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Cross posting something I wrote in USCE: I’ve cracked the nut. CPI reflects actual purchase prices and includes the substitution effect. So if prices have bifurcated ala my previous post: Bar Ran Dun posted:They lower prices by sales. What happens is just before inventory comes in an a sale starts and they’ll do like 2 for 6 dollars or things like buy two get three free. Then visible tag price on the shelf could have diverged significantly from actual prices paid measured by CPI! One goes into the store, see’s the gently caress you price on soda and chips. That feels terrible. Goods that were previously affordable and that are middle class signifiers are priced exorbitantantly and feel inaccessible. But then those same goods are mostly purchased in the deep mark down period right before restocking, thus the actual purchase price, what inflation measures is less than the regular shelf price increase! The gap as huge as whatever the discounting is! Price sensitive consumers see a 200, 300 % increase in the regular shelf price and that feels like bullshit. They lose access to those goods outside of sales periods. Inflation only increases by the actual price increase which is going to be heavily influenced by the sales discount pricing. Retailers can then use the “merchandising“ category and all the sales discounting appears as a loss.”
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Dec 26, 2023 21:56
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
I feel like that this could only be true if shoppers were highly cognizant of and constantly acting on those price reductions, and even then would require much broader sale adjusting than I've ever witnessed. I tend to shop sale goods because I can cook and work with whatever, but even then it's probably only about a third of purchases I'm making on any given grocery trip. I could maybe see this on a narrow range of low-perishable goods, but not meat/dairy/produce or even a lot of staples and "more lasting" things like booze. And imo I think those latter perishable categories are the modern middle class signifiers, not chips and soda. "The good eggs" prices are what I hear gripes about, not Pepsi.
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Dec 26, 2023 22:13
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JustJeff88 posted:I am particularly error-prone when near the self-scan. Some might conjecture that the 40% increase in the prices of staple foods in my diet over the last few years has something to do with that, but I'm fairly certain I'm just made clumsy by the giddiness of living in such 'free' countries. And the employees are so overcome with joy for their treatment and fair wages that they are too busy orgasming and handing out bags to help me be less clumsy
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Dec 26, 2023 22:17
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Zachack posted:I feel like that this could only be true if shoppers were highly cognizant of and constantly acting on those price reductions, and even then would require much broader sale adjusting than I've ever witnessed. The PepsiCo sized manufacturers dictate the sales on the prices nationally on their goods. Having recently come back from a cross country trip, they look relatively uniform across grocers, across regions. loving Lays are 7 bucks + a bag in Publix in FL and QFC in WA The meat /dairy / produce are price by the grocers and I believe they are doing so algorithmically and I think that’s targeted down the the store level from POS data. These are varying widely sometimes dollars a pound higher between regions (but well well above what should be merely transportation differences)
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Dec 26, 2023 22:38
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I'm constantly amused, darkly, that everything in this thread comes down to the axiom any idiot can comprehend but few do: Companies do not exist to provide goods and services; their only goal is to make profit and they will stop at nothing to increase it.Jaxyon posted:And the employees are so overcome with joy for their treatment and fair wages that they are too busy orgasming and handing out bags to help me be less clumsy Wage slaves just don't know how to handle all of that freedom, I suppose. Honestly, I think that some places realise that self-tills are very prone to 'shrinkage' but live with it because it's still more profitable to just not hire checkout workers.
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Dec 26, 2023 22:47
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Most grocers also have a scheme where staple/popular goods are constantly on sale, so while it is partly a psychological thing to make people think they have to act now even though the thing is never actually going off of sale, the other purpose is to just penalize people that don't have the store loyalty card.
OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 02:31
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OneEightHundred posted:Most grocers also have a scheme where staple/popular goods are constantly on sale, so while it is partly a psychological thing to trigger FOMO in people who don't realize that the thing is never actually going off of sale, the other purpose is to penalize people that don't have the store loyalty card. Others seem to just have regular massive sales on basic items like chicken and what not.
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Dec 27, 2023 02:45
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mobby_6kl posted:Tesco here seems to have started doing that. It used to be it'd give you an occasional smallish discount on something but now tons of items seem to be like double the price unless you have their card. it's like going out of business sales where the retailer cranks everything to the highest price possible and then runs a sale where it's higher priced than the average retail at other stores
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Dec 27, 2023 02:49
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Department stores have been running that scam for ages, like if I want to buy pants at Kohls, the "regular price" doesn't exist. They're always on sale, it's just a different sale every week. I think New York State has or used to have a fun law making minimum quantity type sales illegal, so if you saw "buy one get one free" and you bought one then it'd be 50% off.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:08
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 It hits different when it’s food.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:21
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OneEightHundred posted:Most grocers also have a scheme where staple/popular goods are constantly on sale, so while it is partly a psychological thing to make people think they have to act now even though the thing is never actually going off of sale, the other purpose is to just penalize people that don't have the store loyalty card. It's sad that the concept of 'feel good' pricing works so well. Some department store chain, possibly Macy's, did away with that for a while and it apparently didn't work. I am dismayed, but not surprised. As for the 'act now before it's gone!' tactic, I'm ashamed to admit that I am prone to that when it comes to digital game sales. Bar Ran Dun posted:
The predominant grocery store chain in the pretentious university town that I recently passed through was doing the exact some sale but $8.99. The reality is that five 12-packs for less than $4 each including tax is a great price considering the God-awful inflation of recent years. Of course, the inflation is mostly the fault of corporate greed, such sales are cynical and manipulative and they also encourage overconsumption and hoarding.
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Dec 27, 2023 05:20
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Yeah I definitely need sixty cans of soda around the house.
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Dec 27, 2023 05:32
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DR FRASIER KRANG posted:Yeah I definitely need sixty cans of soda around the house. Listen, we've got a ton of money invested in these production lines and they need to keep moving, so that soda has to go into someone or down someone else's sink. What, slow production?! What are you, insane?
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Dec 27, 2023 05:40
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
The price of a 12-pack at WinCo before the pandemic was about 4 dollars, or sometimes below 3 dollars on a sale. The same 12-packs today are now 7 dollars, or sometimes just under 5 dollars on a sale. There's something about coke and pepsi products that seems to have climbed higher than other foods, and I think it's because they can't shrink their products as easily due to standard soda can sizes.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:50
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They definitely sell 8oz mini cans and 16oz bottles now though.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:54
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Freakazoid_ posted:The price of a 12-pack at WinCo before the pandemic was about 4 dollars, or sometimes below 3 dollars on a sale. Before inflation, Winco sold Arizona Ice Tea for 50¢ a can. Now it’s at 75¢. 
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Dec 27, 2023 23:02
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DeathChicken posted:I feel like Safeway has always gouged. When I was a kid it was a running thing "We're not shopping at Safeway, the prices are insane"
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Dec 27, 2023 23:04
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Detective No. 27 posted:Before inflation, Winco sold Arizona Ice Tea for 50¢ a can. Now it’s at 75¢. Around me there has always been a sign saying the price printed on the AZ can will not be honored but I suspect that has something to do with the sugar tax.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:05
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JustJeff88 posted:The reality is that five 12-packs for less than $4 each including tax is a great price considering the God-awful inflation of recent years. And you’ve identified what I mean by bifurcated. 9-10 bucks sucks, that’s the rich person price. 4 bucks is okay, that’s the everybody else but only when on sale price. They are selling at two different prices, two different market demographics. But the higher one is the everyday tag. So inflation is mostly reflecting the 4 bucks sale. But everybody sees the 9-10 dollar price everyday. So prices are much much higher than inflation would indicate! But actual purchases reflect inflation. And it’s a huge gap like more than double!
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Dec 27, 2023 23:22
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My local bougie grocery store in an extremely wealthy area with no actual "mass retail crime" has started to go all draconian and it's so annoying its been making me go elsewhere sometimes. I used to be able to just take a single big very comfortable to hold shopping bag to the store, load it up, then take that to the till and pay and say "no thanks" to a receipt. Now they have giant signs saying you can't do that, you have to use one of those nasty plastic shopping baskets. I used to be able to hit a few shops together using one bag, now they say they don't even want you bringing bags with other stuff from other stores into the store. So even if I went to the shop next door to buy some stuff this grocery store doesn't even sell, they say I can't have that bag with me in the store. What am I supposed to do, return home between each shop? Where do they expect me to put my other purchases? And these are all small shops in a pre-car shopping village high street sort of situation, not like some big car-centric strip mall where you could expect people to put each purchase in your trunk between shops. Most people are here on foot doing frequent small shops. yes, I have a single shopping bag that has a bottle of wine from the liquor store, a bunch of chocolate and stationary from the drug store, and now some apples and crackers from the grocery store. This is illegal now.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:28
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They expect that you've got a car to keep it in.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:59
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Bar Ran Dun posted:And you’ve identified what I mean by bifurcated. 9-10 bucks sucks, that’s the rich person price. 4 bucks is okay, that’s the everybody else but only when on sale price. Seems like a tactic to boost very specific pricing metrics. I've worked with C-level guys that are completely obsessed about manipulating pricing structures to show more margin, even if they aren't getting it, they use it in projections and forecasts to juice different numbers for projections. I say that only as where I think this tiered pricing birthed its corporate usefulness and then followed with the current iteration, to manipulate it all the time, every second of the day. I can think of all sorts of ways category and sales managers can juice their numbers using these sorts of tactics. I was working a MAP project a few years back, and it appears that none of it really matters as a terms of law, just a policy to be enforced at a company level. Amazon has broken the seal and no-one enforced against them, now its open season. Here's some reading I'm brushing up on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-4 It's really gotta reach some sort of breaking point soon. Just how flash trading shouldn't be legal, it shouldn't be legal to adjust all prices to MP, just cause you can get away with it.
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Dec 28, 2023 00:21
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cat botherer posted:God they suck. It's a poo poo grocery store with poo poo product, but has beyond Whole Foods prices. I think they only get away with it due to their near-monopoly status in a lot of poor areas. Ding ding ding, I live in a poor area and it's absolutely it. If WinCo moving in changed anything, I certainly haven't seen it, and WinCo is certainly not going to be convenient for people who live near the Safeway but can't drive across town to go to WinCo.
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Dec 28, 2023 00:21
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