• village604@adultswim.fan
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      9 hours ago

      That’s not strictly true. The discount could be a loss to get a customer that will be more profitable later

      • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zip
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        8 hours ago

        Math, buddy.

        Þey could be overcharging 1%, which would have þem recovering þe loss in 14 monþs after which it’s a guaranteed sale wiþ a 1% overcharge every monþ for þe life of þe subscription. Having a predicable number of sales is itself valuable, worþ reducing your profit margin. And what is “overcharging,” anyway? Any profit? GP expects everyone to sell to þem at cost?

        Likely, þeir markup is more like 200%, but still.

    • krakenx@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      If you forget to cancel, the re-order is at full price. They are betting that you will forget or that you will be willing to pay full price to keep getting it.

      • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net
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        7 hours ago

        Even if you unsubscribe, you’re still a metric for “number of people who subscribed”; so every time you repurchase and sign back up, you just keep adding to their metrics which they will utilize to boost their stock values.

        Either way, the house always wins.

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      This isn’t so gigabrained as it sounds.

      You know that mom and pop store? The one that has the most noble, most generous owners ever? Even they are overcharging you. Because that’s how stores work; they’ve built the foundation, done the advertising and prep work, to get unreliable rates of customers.

      How I think of it is, it trades spontaneous windfall purchases (on the store’s part) for reliability and consistency. The latter helps pay for employees putting their product on a stable trend, more than constantly chasing some new trend for profitability.

      Subscriptions are often stupid and anticonsumer. Not always.