Fueling Book Pricing Weirdness

There’s a companion book to the Fueling the Future series I mentioned earlier.

Here’s the weirdness: the publisher’s price for the book is $37.95. That’s also what it’s selling for at the local Indigo store in Charlottetown.

However, on Indigo.ca, the store’s website, the book is listed at $34.95 regular price, with a sale price of $24.46. That means that even with shipping charges added on (for a total of $30.36), the online price is cheaper than the store price.

While I suppose this may make sense on some macro level, it does seem somewhat absurd that the same company will charge me $7 more to get in my car to drive to their store to purchase a book than they will to hand-deliver it to my door.

The final irony, given the nature of the title, is that shipping lots of books to a central location is undoubtedly more energy efficient than hand-delivery by mail to individual consumers.