It annoys the hell out of me that in the current economy it seems that loyalty gets punished. New customers often get the best deals and get fleeced once the promo runs out. New employees get hired at higher salaries than people who have been with the company for years. I think in the long run this is really corrosive for society.

This is common because there is a cost (usually non-monetary: effort, risk, having to evaluate offers etc.) to changing the status quo.

You're always to some extent buying a cat in a bag, once you know what's in the bag, and the payments are set up etc., it makes sense that the service is worth more to you.

The same goes the other way too, however: Acquiring a new customer is costly (see above - you usually have to give them an extra incentive, you need to find/advertise to customers, etc.), so keeping a customer is worth a lot.

Which often means that there are great deals either for new customers or to retain ones that are plausibly threatening to leave (ever called your ISP to end your contract? wondering why many try to force you to talk to them before ending a contract?) and the rest that doesn't have the energy to play the game gets screwed. So you will get the "loyalty deal" but only if you put work into it.

I agree that it really sucks, but I think that's just how incentives are aligned, and incentives tend to lead to outcomes.

I wonder, do you see this changing now that the strategy of growth-at-all-costs is, at least for now, receiving more scrutiny?

Somehow I doubt it. They will just use different language.

In this modern age we should be able to offer something like "micro-stocks" to customers. Like a "our product isn't there all the way there, but you use us because you believe in us so we promise that if we are successful we'll pay back the people that believed in us".

Even if the fractions are so small that it only amounts to cents, early supporters now have every incentive to tell ALL their friends about it and root for you however they can

As a customer you also get the piece of mind that later price changes won't be unfair to you. You know that you were somehow compensated for your early commitments. In fact you even stand to benefit from all the new customers price drops could be bringing in

If 500 customers did this, I think the SEC would label this as a "security" and the company would be required to register as a public company, more or less. This is essentially what happened to Facebook which led to them going public: the private equity pool became too diverse and triggered this threshold, so publicly listing made sense.

Why don't Kickstarter campaigns have this problem? AFAIK it's because they are just presales, there's no notion of ownership so they aren't treated as securities. A poorly-designed kickstarter that looked like micro stocks would probably get shot down.

This is usually how Cow Shares work; in practice it's closer to a deposit entitling you to benefits, which is probably the best type of contract for this situation.

one bitcoin transaction consumes 1,449 kWh, or about as much as 50 days of power for the average US household

>one bitcoin transaction consumes 1,449 kWh

Thank you, I knew it was an energy hog, but had never looked at it this way.

That's enough electricity to melt 2 tons of aluminum, or about half an hour of peak production from an average size US wind turbine.

Bitcoin is not the only digital token technology. Ethereum consumes a fraction of the energy Bitcoin consumes.

Right Ethereum is really lucky to have Bitcoin around to make it look good. It (very recently) cut it's energy usage by ~99.84% yet one ETH transaction is still 50x the amount of energy as a MasterCard transaction

You mean stocks?

I can’t see how this is corrosive for society exactly, but this strategy exists because it works (even though it’s not without some downsides). Churning isn’t free, the employee/customer has to commit resources to churning, and especially in the case of an employee, accept risks.

You’re always going to have some churn, so no matter what approach you’re taking you always have to tune the incentives so that churn occurs at the level you’ve deemed acceptable. If retention becomes dramatically cheaper than acquisition, then the existing customers/employees really only have themselves to blame.

This exact culture in the economy has made me go from a 15 year contract with my local utility company to using a service (for any Germans: go look up switchup) that handles cancelling and getting a new contract with one of the large power companies each year. You'll get market rates and a substantial bonus.

I wouldn't have made that step if they hadn't originally increased the price for me while offering better conditions for new customers.

Yes, it is often referred to as a "loyalty tax". Auto insurance companies purportedly count on it to increase their profits.

And speaking of salaries, I saw fellow engineers that came and went from tech jobs, staying perhaps about a year at each. I didn't have the self-confidence or stress-tolerance to do the same but they always seemed to make bank doing this — getting a larger compensation with each jump.

Not always. Some services I use have increased their prices dramatically, but I'm still on the old grandfathered plans.

I do that for my users as well. If I increase the pricing for the paid subscription, all existing paid users will always keep the old, cheaper plan.

quite literally, T Mobile will introduce a new price tier iirc next week where bundling any postpaid voice line with home Internet will mean your home Internet will be USD 25 a month, down from USD 50 a month. Existing home Internet customers are excepted.

I am not a big fan of cable but I have since signed up for time warner spectrum for Internet just in case...

These companies assume we are too lazy, misinformed, and stupid to do anything.

Edit: charter, not time warner (?)

> These companies assume we are too lazy, misinformed, and stupid to do anything.

Correctly assume *

HN is not representative of the general population, a lot of people don’t bother to switch every provider every year, especially when they have obnoxious clauses like “this will renew in 12 months at 500% the price unless you send a signed letter at least 90 days in advance.“ Yes, probably illegal, still doesn’t stop them from trying.

Even I, attentive as I am, still get fleeced every once in a while.

> New employees get hired at higher salaries than people who have been with the company for years

A good number of companies have committees and HR reviewing salaries annually for anomalies. That does make employment worse in some ways, but at least not in the way you specified.

It's the same for employees. New hires generally get considerably better comp than veterans. In both cases it's taking existing relationships for granted.

I don't disagree your point here, but those seem to serve different purposes? Was your partner not trying to address a need for new customers/revenue? Did this result in current customers expanding their business with you enough that this wasn't necessary then?