Because I am a good friend and a solid person, I sometimes put together a quiz for my associates. Because I am a slapdash friend and a flake, the answers are often contestable – you could even say wrong – and I choose to see this as part of the unforgettable fun. Anyway, on Saturday, in the round called The Wonderful World of the Young, I asked the price of a ticket to Reading festival and, in The Wonderful World of the Old, the price of an Oasis ticket. These questions turned out to be so profoundly unanswerable that the whole thing disintegrated in rancour.
Even after you had added every caveat – early bird or regular, sitting or standing, official site or online tout – there was no true price. There were people round the table who had paid £291 for Reading tickets, yet the lowest price you could find on the whole of the internet was £327.75. (You’ve got to love that 75p: such strong “count the pennies and the astronomically large number of pounds we’ve just lifted off you will take care of themselves” energy.) One person claimed they were about to spend £74,000 on an Oasis ticket, but this turned out to be their position in the queue.
“Surge pricing” is a technical term, to mean a price that responds to a surge in demand by itself surging. Dynamic pricing is the same, except it has a counter-offer – that when demand is lower, the price goes down.
You think that is a swizz? Welcome to my sidebar story. Months ago, I hired a car for the last week of August, but it was booked accidentally in my son’s name. When I called to correct, they said: “Fine, but we’ll have to cancel the booking and rebook and it’s dynamic pricing.” I had an operatic tantrum about this, on the basis that it must have been a computer error, not mine, since I know my son cannot drive; indeed, I know he is 16, having been there when he was born. I was the victim of a sexist algorithm, in other words.
The call operator just shrugged and said: “It is what it is,” and I got squeakier and squeakier, invoking my inalienable rights under the feminist Magna Carta. This went on until I was struggling to breathe. Then the number came back – and it was 200 quid cheaper. So, yes, dynamic pricing does exist. Oh, and a very patient man at Sixt also exists.
Price gouging, meanwhile, is the simple raising of prices beyond what could ever be considered reasonable or fair. For that, I have to refer you to K-pop. But economics lacks a word for the costs involved in legends’ music tours, AKA the weaponisation of love for profit. Take a band that was never going to reform in a million years, announce a previously unimaginable tour and passions will run high. Fans have been granted the impossible, after all; this isn’t a market event, as there is no natural competitor. It’s more like magic. You can set the price at £100 or you can call it a lucky dip – might pay £100, might pay £1,000. Moral objection is pointless – the tacit assertion is that, if you love the band enough, money is meaningless to you.
Maybe that is true of one person in the country – that they love (as a wild for instance) Oasis so much that they are prepared to go to a loan shark. Generally speaking, though, the money-is-no-object-if-you-truly-care principle is a smokescreen puffed out by people for whom money is the only object.
Weddings work the same way, except the formula is more embedded. You take an ordinary thing – a dress, a canapé, a glass of prosecco, a venue with a pretty view – consider its value, you multiply that by 10, slap it on the table and dare your marks (sorry, brides and grooms) to protest: who can put a price on matrimony? Couples who really love each other relish the chance to demonstrate that with profligacy.
The same goes for pets. I was once invited to spend £5,000 on an MRI to see if my elderly prince of a dog had a brain tumour, even though there was no cure for brain tumours in dogs. Just because, if I loved him, I would want to know.
Anyway, a nice, simple compound term, made up by Germans (Liebepreiswucherie) or the Magnetic Fields (If-You-Don’t-Cry-It-Isn’t-Love Pricing), would do it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
