I don't have any moral problems with sales. Some people have money and less time. Others have less money and more time. Sales let each of those groups use the resources they have acquire the product. People with less money but more time can spend that time hunting for deals. Busy people with cash can pay full price.
They already price discriminate. In Latin America Steam store you can by Factorio spending just US$9,00.
Some people value the product differently. If I'd play it for hours, probably it is money well spent, but I'm a casual gamer. The game looks nice, but I wouldn't spend the price of good books in it.
Moral arguments against price discrimination center around fairness and inefficient outcomes.
For example if a vaccine for an infectious disease was priced higher for people who are more likely to be exposed to that disease (because they have a greater willingness to pay), it could create an unfair burden on this buyer segment and even place the overall population health at risk. Just because a seller knows they have greater leverage over this vulnerable population.
I think medical care is a problematic example to use because health is already fraught with moral connotations, and medicine as a product category is not at all conducive to an efficient market.
Arguing, even correctly, that price discrimination is bad for healthcare does not necessarily imply that it's bad for other things. Healthcare is different.
Parents a and b are considering whether to enroll their children in a private school.
Parent A lives in a nice neighborhood that can lobby for better funding for public schools.
Parent B lives in a worse school district.
The private school realizes that parent B has worse options, and that they can upcharge parent B. The private school knows that at a certain price point parent A will simply decide to send their child to the high quality public school in their district, so they charge that parent less.
Parent B is disadvantaged because they have weaker bargaining power, and the price discrimination is simply exacerbating existing inequalities in the community.
I don't think that price discrimination is inherently unethical. But the criteria used to discriminate can certainly be unethical. Look up "reverse redlining" for example.
Except if you try and price gouge parent B, it doesn’t work because they’re poor. So instead you price gouge parent A because they are rich, by raising tuition and giving a charitable scholarship/discount/etc. to parent B.
Again, schooling is another example that is already heavily morally loaded (the opportunity we pass on to our children may be the most important aspect of all of society) and where there is nothing even approximating an efficient market.
My problem with sales is that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's completely wasted. If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.
Edit: In a way it reminds me of mining cryptocurrency. It's a system designed to reward people who can prove that they're wasting some other resource.
> that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's completely wasted.
A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that this particular human has available. Letting them choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than removing that choice. There may be "better" things they could do with it according to you, but ultimately it should be their choice.
The irony is particulary deep here because hunting down a sale is surely no less wasteful to society than actually playing Factorio which is a pointless videogame famous for being an addictive time-sink. If the goal was to maximize societal benefit, we'd remove Factorio from the market entirely.
> If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.
I think you're jumping to a conclusion that these people are particularly poor. But my only claim is that people have different relative distributions of money versus time, and that is probably true at all wealth levels. There are both idle rich and workaholics. There are poor folks working three jobs and raising three kids and others that are couch potatoes.
Sales are a way to let consumers at any economic level reflect their relative priority between time and cash.
> A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that this particular human has available. Letting them choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than removing that choice. There may be "better" things they could do with it according to you, but ultimately it should be their choice.
Unless you consider the sale price as the base price, in which case you're forcing people to spend time hunting a sale to not get gouged, and it's strictly worse than having a fixed lower price.
I can see the value of letting people pay with time if they are less inclined to pay with money, but I wish we could let them pay by actually doing something useful with that time, rather than by having them waste it (and I don't think entertainment is a total waste of time).
I don't know of a good way to actually make that happen, and I'm not suggesting we should ban sales or anything like that, just that the current system wastes people's time and it would be better if it didn't.
> If the goal was to maximize societal benefit, we'd remove Factorio from the market entirely.
I suppose you're one of those people who sees video games as, well, I'll use your own words:
> pointless...addictive time-sink
The same could be said of novels, movies, sporting events, TV shows, and plays.
Removing art and entertainment from society because it's not "socially beneficial" is a terrible policy.
The end of society should be to improve human life. Producing things that are economically useful to produce more things is a means to that end. It's a very effective means. But if you confuse it with an end, you get a terrible repressive society where no one's allowed to do anything for the joy of it.
People voluntarily use their money to buy things they enjoy. Money is basically a credit the economy gives to people for helping the economy produce stuff, that then allows them to consume some of the stuff that the economy produces.
If you disallow people from spending their money on things that aren't "socially beneficial," the whole economic system implodes because (a) there's no incentive for people to produce stuff because they're not allowed to get consumption as a reward, and (b) there's no consumption to drive the incentive to produce stuff.
