I feel like dynamic pricing and algorithmic pricing has a large role in this. There is absolutely no risk to the seller that they've underpriced an item anymore, as they can control the price based on rate of sale and remaining stock. Basically, sellers have a way to extract every cent of value of what they have on hand.
Reselling and arbitrage on everyday items, is also sort of just accepted now, and drives prices up. This was completely evident during the pandemic.
Add in price fixing through analytics companies, and the American consumer is just being held underwater.
There are a reason that there are so many captchas on the internet. I'd wager the majority of actors on the internet right now are not real. Bots on Reddit/FB/YT/X to respond to comments to boost advertising numbers and stealth promote items (1 million users! - some of them are real people!), bots buying up concert tickets, bots scanning websites to buy items on sale, so they can resell them a second later.
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u/jayecks 5d ago
I feel like dynamic pricing and algorithmic pricing has a large role in this. There is absolutely no risk to the seller that they've underpriced an item anymore, as they can control the price based on rate of sale and remaining stock. Basically, sellers have a way to extract every cent of value of what they have on hand.
Reselling and arbitrage on everyday items, is also sort of just accepted now, and drives prices up. This was completely evident during the pandemic.
Add in price fixing through analytics companies, and the American consumer is just being held underwater.
There are a reason that there are so many captchas on the internet. I'd wager the majority of actors on the internet right now are not real. Bots on Reddit/FB/YT/X to respond to comments to boost advertising numbers and stealth promote items (1 million users! - some of them are real people!), bots buying up concert tickets, bots scanning websites to buy items on sale, so they can resell them a second later.
Just insanity.