Back to the bazaar

Shopping with grandma was one thing and shopping through the internet is a totally different experience, as VIJAYSHREE VENKATARAMAN finds out.

MY mother was the eldest of six children. And since I was old enough to accompany my grandmother on shopping trips, I became her little deputy in seeing my aunts and uncles happily married. From the finest silks for the trousseau to the humble milk saucepan, we hit all the right stores in town for the wedding purchases.

We set out in the Gazelle at an hour when the shops were unlikely to be very crowded and the managers could bestow plenty of attention on their most favoured customer. A connoisseur on a tight budget, she earned this coveted title easily and wore it well, just like she did her diamonds and her perfectly starched sungadi saris. The transactions started in right earnest, soon after she politely turned down offers for coffee or fruit juice, and there was a satisfied seller too, at the end of it. It was quite easy to tell by the unexpected little treats I got. Sure patti was fond of me but when she bought things, which were not on her current list, I believe it was her way of celebrating yet another shrewdly won bargain.

In my teens, I no longer trailed behind her and was encouraged to go out into the world and develop my own "buyer's instinct", as it were. My first stop was Bata, the national footwear chain, and it seemed like a safe bet for shoes. I did not need to rely on my haggling skills as the price was marked right, down to the second decimal place and the quality was considered good. The clerk at the store, however, had very definite ideas on who was well- heeled and who was not. In the absence of surveillance systems, every one from the second category was treated like a potential shoplifter - even 13-year-old girls with oily plaits framing their faces. I continued to shop there but not, as the ad went, by choice.

My quest for anonymity and fairness took me far and I had begun to believe I had attained shopping nirvana with the arrival of e- commerce. Just be prepared to do some quick, complete research on the net and you were all set to have the deal delivered to your doorstep and without the shipping charges either, if you looked hard enough, I told myself. I lived in this blissful state till I heard about amazon.com's "random-pricing tests" on the radio, a while ago. Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said, "The tests were useful in determining a price point - the right balance between how much the company could charge and still maintain good sales volume." In other words, how much could they charge a person for a book and get away with it? The answer, of course, lies in a person's shopping history. Every book-lover who ever surfed the net, had this question for the world's greatest bookstore - How could they do it?

They used the same tools that enable them to make flattering, personalised offerings. Amazon.com has faced allegations - which it denies - that it offered different prices for different customers based on digital dossiers it had carefully compiled on each one. Setting prices based on a shopper's buying habits or purchasing power is called "dynamic pricing". In posh neighbourhoods, stores can, and do, charge more for the same goods than in outlets in poorer areas. Auctions and reverse- auctions, are examples too, thought the latter works very well for the buyer. Scalping is another case in point. If your wanted to watch "first day, first show" but did not make prior arrangements, it was your own damn fault! As long as this was not extended to essential commodities, all is thought to be fair in this game. An economist's view of "essential" might differ from yours or mine. The worldwide web was supposed to be a great equaliser. As the famous New Yorker cartoon put it "On the Internet, nobody knows that you are a dog". Not true, they have everyone figured out!

If I am a good customer in someone's books, does it mean I can get better deals or am I viewed as a sucker? Did I sound too irate when I complained to their service department, last December that the book I was having them mail to a friend was getting far too late to be a Christmas gift? Would they hold it against me? Was I too critical in my last review of Anita Desai's recent book Fasting and Feasting? Did they know, even before I did, that because I am passionate about Rushdie's writing, I was going to buy Padma Lakshmi's Easy Exotic: a Model's Low-fat Recipes from Around the World? Should I even be writing reviews on the site anymore?

Price discrimination is really hard to swallow, even though I am told it happens in the marketplace all the time. Caveat Emptor was fair warning in ancient Rome, and it still is in the digital era. I was an overworked graduate student doing research in the lab and now I have to brace myself to be an overworked shopper who has to do the research to get the right price, every single time. It was never amazon.com's intention to remind me of my maternal grandmother, I am sure, but they have. Did Patti have it easy?

The writer is an Inorganic Chemist by training and writes code for a living.

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