Live Pricing

“You are through to our award winning customer services. How can we help you today?”

Do those words make you twitch with righteous sarcasm? Do you want to know, ‘What award?’. Do you shout into the ether, ‘You wouldn’t need award winning customer service if xyz was done properly in the first place.”

You are not alone. 

The thing with award winning customer service is that the company you are ringing gets so many complaints that they have to employ teams of people to persuade you that you  are plain wrong. You put the phone down, thinking, “Stupid me. How could I have not known that?” Then you spend several days thinking about it. It wakes you at 3am - what doesn’t? And you write a blog.

“It’s live pricing, madam. It’s on our website. It does state it clearly, if you would just care to read it.”

I was vaguely aware of live pricing. Actually, more than aware. I’ve worked in a bank on a graduate training scheme where I hated almost every moment except foreign exchange. I happened to be doing my few weeks to learn everything foreign on Black Wednesday and while older men with paunches were running round ashen faced, I found the lines and lines of red ink oddly satisfying. Then in my few weeks on stocks and shares I understood that live pricing was about making up a cost for something imaginary. And things that are not real can change all the time. My imaginary friend from childhood, baby Cumby, who is sometimes green and sometimes not, said, “I wonder how much I’m worth today?” Obviously, baby Cumby was priceless. Then I moved onto gilts and the precious metals market. Catalytic converters had just been made mandatory and so the price of Palladium had gone through the roof. I passed my economics banking exams by biting my tongue and not writing the word immoral during an essay on supply and demand. 

I suppose it makes sense for items that are in high and variable demand, like money, oil, holidays or Taylor Swift tickets. You have to give people with loads of money the chance to make even more by buying those items cheaply and selling them on to poorer people. 

You are probably wondering what item had caused me to ring the award winning customer service team. It must have been an energy company, right? If you’ve walked the Pembrokeshire coast path then you’ll have seen the boats waiting outside Milford Haven until the market changes for them to get the best price at which point they all scramble to be the first in. (If you haven’t walked the coastal path then you should and you should stay with my lovely friends Liz and Dave in Tenby https://www.penmar-tenby.co.uk/ )

But it wasn’t. It was a printer cartridge, for quite an old printer. Who knew there was a market in toner?

I had ordered a branded version and they rang me up and persuaded me to swap it to their own version and they would refund me the difference. When it arrived it was broken and didn’t work so I asked them to send me what I’d originally ordered. 

“You haven’t actually credited the refund for the difference to me,” I said with certainty, “So you can just cancel that.”

“Oh no, madam. I can’t do that.It has already been processed. It’s on my computer.”

“If you can’t stop it then you can take the amount again.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can credit the refund to your account and you’ll have to reorder the product you’d like or I can replace the item with the same.”

The branded toner cartridge had increased in price by £10!

“Can you not honour the original price, as you sent me a faulty item that I didn’t order on your insistence?”

“Oh no, madam. It’s live pricing.”