Thread | Brutkey

Is there an English term for those annoying pricing strategies where a company removes essential parts of a product to lower the marketed price, and then raises the price of the part they have removed to make customers pay even more?

For instance tonight I was booking a winter holiday, and I realized the company had achieved a competitive price by cutting down the usual baggage size of 23 kg to just 10 kg, and then forcing everyone to pay extra for what was now called "additional baggage".

RJ
@rjohnston@mstdn.ca

@randahl@mastodon.social
Junk fees. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/office-consumer-affairs/en/business-practices-and-consumer-concerns/junk-fees

Emilion
@emilion@infosec.exchange

@randahl@mastodon.social

"Doctorow has described the process of enshittification as happening through "twiddling": the continual adjustment of the parameters of the system in search of marginal improvements of profits, without regard to any other goal."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

De_Minimis
@De_Minimis@infosec.exchange

@randahl@mastodon.social I think its found somewhere around chapter 3 in the Neoliberal Handbook.

That Old Guy with the Beard
@IanAMartin@mstdn.ca

@randahl@mastodon.social Possibly ‘simplification,’ or ‘user-pay’ (because you can customize your version of the product by choosing different products), or ‘shrinkflation’ (but that is only making smaller a bottle of something).

Or just “a rip-off.”