Sure things fluctuate in price but how are they allowed such targeted predatory algorithms that change every second ?
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For the most part, people are allowed to set their own prices. This means that they can change their prices. There is no time limit or requirement for changings those prices.
Be Alar every store is allowed to change their prices. Airlines are certainly a lot quicker about doing it, but lots of stores fiddle with pricing.
When is growing up in the 1970s, grocery stores were infamous for updating their prices.
In America we are accustomed to the ‘one durable price’ easy of shopping and many stores are happy to fall in with this preference. But there isn’t any law about it.
Lack of regulations. This applies for nearly any non essential good: business can charge whatever they think people are willing to pay
The algorithms aren’t really “predatory” in the way that lawmakers would object to. They mostly exist to charge people as much as they’d be willing to pay. That might sound bad, but it also means charging people *lower* prices if they wouldn’t spend anything higher. Sure, that’s getting money from more people, but those people are presumably benefited by the ticket even taking into account the price.
Because they have a shitty/brilliant business model and rely on charging you more based on how bad you need it. Also, the major airlines all have the same major institutional investors and massive lobbyist budgets – so this is unlikely to ever change.
They’re not “predatory” they’re market rate like anything else. Companies can charge anything they want at any time, they just have to be honest at the time of purchase.
There’s no law against changing your prices. Of course you can’t change the price of something someone has already committed to buying (say, after they selected the tickets and while they’re filling in their credit card details), but if people haven’t bought your product you can price it however you want. There’s nothing predatory in that.
They don’t literally change every second, but they calculate demand relative to time of departure and can adjust to optimize for filling the most seats at the highest price. That’s the goal of business. Dynamic pricing is more easy to do online with networked sales software like airlines use, but the airlines also have the dilemma of expiring product — once that flight takes off, that seat can never be sold. For a store, it doesn’t really matter if that shirt sells in a week or 3 weeks they can just keep it on the rack, or send it to an outlet store, or a liquidator to end up in Marshall’s and still get something for the product. An airline gets $0 once the plane leaves, so they have more incentive to try and fill seats.
It’s not that they’re changing prices every second, but there’s thousands of people buying tickets every second. Sometimes the cheap seats just sell out, especially for holidays/popular times.
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