Hm, though to argue against myself for a minute, it occurs to me that my unhappiness with e.g. Amazon Kindle books might be poetically summarized as "Kindle is like buying books from an airline's sales department." Non-refundable, non-tradable, locked to me.

So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my metaphorical socks.

Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline pricing, for example. Yikes.

Rental car companies already use airline-like pricing schemes, with a mandatory minimum rental period of 24 hours. One of Zipcar's selling points is that their pricing scheme is simpler and more granular. If Zipcar changed their pricing scheme, they'd become just another rental car company in the minds of their customers.

I suspect that there will always be people who prefer the more straightforward style of pricing. After all, knowing exactly how much you're going to pay and knowing you won't be paying for any unnecessary hours counts as a feature for a lot of people. It's like buying a Linode. It might not be the cheapest option for all use cases, but it gives you peace of mind.

Zipcar already operates basic peak/off-peak pricing, with weekends being pricier per hour than during the week.

Different prices for easily resold products is alive & well. The biggest example is coupon discounts, where stores enable people to buy things they wouldn't otherwise at the cost of some inconvenience for them.

People who are less price sensitive don't clip generally coupons.

The same argument applies to socks - if you aren't price sensitive then you'll pay for new socks. Others may well be happy buying socks on a secondary market, so stores can provide different pricing for them (using coupons or whatever).

Well, sure, I would never argue that you can't differentially price socks in different market segments, using coupons and regions and so forth. You obviously can, and everyone does, to some degree.

But this hardly rises to the level of an incipient retail apocalypse. It isn't even new. This is nineteenth-century stuff.

The question is: Will differential pricing be pushed farther, now that computers are available to dynamically segment the sock market in real time? (Perhaps wool socks will cost more depending on the current local wind chill factor?) Probably. But there's a real cost in trust and goodwill and complexity that must be balanced against the advantages of differential pricing. In general, customers don't love being segmented, particularly in ways that aren't long-standing traditions (as clippable coupons are) or that don't fall along culturally accepted lines (we'll pay more for goods with famous people's names on them, or with made in the USA labels on them - these are just and proper activities in American culture - but we will be less pleased to pay significantly more for goods at 4pm than we do at noon, or to pay more if we're a woman than if we're a man). And so customers will tolerate only so much market segmentation before they start looking for cheaper or more transparent alternatives: Join Costco, shop Priceline, bid for the goods on eBay from a grey-market reseller, use your wife's Amazon account instead of your own, make up some fake demographic information, whatever.

And my hypothesis is that, if you think about pricing from the perspective of the airline industry, you're going to overestimate customer tolerance for fancy pricing games, because the airline-ticket market is constrained in unique ways that don't apply to other industries.