Wharton MBA for Executives

I hate being price discriminated. You see, I tend to be an early adopter. I’m not necessarily the first person on the block to get something, but I’m still with the early group. For example, when the Apple iPhone came out, I didn’t camp out and buy it on the first day. But I did get one within the first week on eBay (and I paid $100 over MSRP for the privilege). When Mercedes Benz redesigned their E-class a few years ago, I just had to get one. So despite all the people telling me not to buy a 1st generation redesigned car, I pre-ordered it and got one of the first ones shipped. And yeah, it had a lot of random issues and I sold it 3 years later.

But price discrimination against people like me really sucks. After I spent $100 over MSRP on that iPhone, Apple decided to lower the price by $200. So in essence, I ended up paying $300 over MSRP. IIRC, Apple did get a lot of complaints so they gave me $50 or $100 or something like that (I don’t remember and I don’t care enough to look it up). But in doing so, they pissed off a lot of consumers (often times, their best ones).

When I was a kid, sometimes my local church used to sell hot dogs as a fundraiser. I was a poor elementary school kid with no money so I didn’t have the $1 needed to buy a hot dog. So I used to hang out by the hot dog stand because I knew that if I waited there long enough, after about an hour or so when nobody is left to buy any more hot dogs, they just closed up shop and gave away whatever was remaining for free. I always ate that free hot dog at the end. It was my way to maximize my consumer surplus by waiting around. Similar to my local movie theatre in Berkly, Michigan that would show movies 3 months after they were released for $1 after everyone already watched them. I used to go to that theatre too…(see a pattern perhaps)?

And now the Kindle. I bought a Kindle a few months ago when the Kindle 2 came out. You can read about it here. I still like my Kindle and use it often. I do recommend it btw. However, I paid $359 for the Kindle and now that the initial early adopters have all purchased it, Amazon has lowered the price to $299. Kent Smetters taught me all about consumer surplus and how businesses want to minimize consumer surplus and 3rd degree price discrimination is one way to do it…so yeah I know what amazon is doing. But I think businesses need to also think long term and not annoy and piss off their most valuable customers. We’re the ones who buy these things early on and we’re the ones who write about them in blogs and we’re the ones who tell all of our friends to buy one.

Anyway, if you want a Kindle, support this website by buying one via this link: click here. But if you really want a bargain, you might want to wait. I predict it will go down to $249 by Christmas.