Thank you, I hadn't seen coupons and sales in this light before. I've been thinking of them in terms of offering the same price to all customers, but this framing that takes convenience and time into account makes the whole system seem much more sensible.
>> Obviously this example doesn't really apply to the first part of your comment about "Grief economy", just the 2nd part about coupons + pricing.
> makes the whole system seem much more sensible
But doesn't it apply there too? Price discrimination has many forms, but a less pretty way of describing that one is the retailer creates non-monetary external costs and mixes them into offers, to discourage customers from simply switching to offers where less money changes hands.
Imagine instead of a "spend time clipping coupons rather than reading with your kids" proof-of-work, the retailer creates an offer which requires someone to degrade themselves, to crawl on the floor and beg, to obtain a low price. This happily permits the retailer to extend affordable service to the desperate, without more profitable customers thinking it worth switching offers! So... yay?
Issues include at least some created work functions not having inherent societal value (coupon clipping is perhaps more like bitcoin factorization than like ai-training captchas). And that created costs, and simply the customer categorization they are but one way to obtain, can have negative impacts on lives and society.
It seems economics conversations are often more explicit about value creation and flow, but less transparent about the creation of "negative value", where it ends up, and its effects. There's more involved with an avocado coupon than merely a pair of price discriminated avocado sales.
