Everyone is used to (but nobody likes) the way that petrol prices rise and fall through the week in a way that has less to do with the cost of production and more to do with increased demand and capacity to pay.
In Australia most mortgages have interest rates that can be raised (and more recently lowered) with no or little notice.
But the same grudging tolerance is not extended towards other products.
This Today I Found Out Story made me think of that.
It’s about a time when Coca-Cola trialled vending machines that had internal thermostats so that they could raise or lower their prices based on what would be understood to be people’s thirst.
It did not prove to be a popular measure.
Perhaps it was simply before its time.
(When I used to drink soft-drink there was a vending machine that sold Coke Zero cheaper than anywhere else and I went out of my way to use it.)
A brief excerpt.
When asked how Coca-Cola as a company planned to take advantage of the amazing revelation that hot weather inexplicably also coincided with an increased demand for cold drinks, Ivester stated that they’d been developing a new line of vending machines that exploited this fact. Specifically, [then CEO Doug] Ivester explained that Coca-Cola had been experimenting with vending machines that contained a thermostat and simple software that would raise the price of the products within the machine once a certain temperature threshold had been reached. As Ivester himself would correctly point out during the interview, neither the technology nor the idea of raising the price of a product in times of great demand was a new concept, noting in regards to the latter that “the machine will simply make this process automatic”.
Read the whole article at Today I Found Out.
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