First, yes companies make it directly harder for customers to give them money all the time with repeating high-discount sales, bespoke proprietary web/mobile store apps, captchas, loyalty/sunk cost programs, etc. These all frustrate market efficiency, so the company can then capture some of the surplus value accumulating due to friction. "Creating a moat" (aka market inefficiency) is like business school 101.
But the longer term disenfranchisement trend I see is making the numeric value of money itself ever more depreciated in favor of fine grained price discrimination. So it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
> it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.
JCPenney has been doing that for decades. When Ron Johnson - the former CEO of Apple retail - came in as CEO and tried to get rid of the constant coupons and “sales” and implement everyday low prices, consumers rebelled and he was rapidly fired.
Even with cash, stores have loyalty programs that consumers gladly sign up for. In the mid 90s, I worked at Radio Shack which was infamous for tracking how often employees asked for names and addresses just to buy batteries
I don't see how that addresses what I said. Sure, similar dynamics have existed for a while. And sure, many consumers are happy with simulated achievement. That doesn't mean they aren't getting taken advantage of, or that the dynamic won't continue to get ever worse as the corporate surveillance machine gains more capabilities.
How much “worse” can they get? Radio Shack for instance has your information about your sales patterns since the 1990s even when using cash.
Credit cards vs cash is the least of your problems and on a meta level, users have been willing to give their information to retailers and been doing couponimg for decades.
I'm still trying to work out whether you don't realize that Radio Shack closed like ten years back, or if you really think there is no difference between the information systems of now and thirty years ago.
But the longer term disenfranchisement trend I see is making the numeric value of money itself ever more depreciated in favor of fine grained price discrimination. So it's not that it will be "harder to give them money", but rather that you will be paying twice as much (ie not receiving coupons/vouchers to obtain the real competitive price) based on them knowing that you personally will still buy.