Fueling Book Pricing Weirdness

Tuesday, December 2, 2003 at 9:33 pm

Peter Rukavina

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.

Comments

I’m guessing since Indigo is

I’m guessing since Indigo is privately held we’ll have a hard time figuring out the differences in profits between the two divisions.

All the same, no store space to rent and no cashiers ready to leap up and help me find what I want can probably save them some cash.

I’m finding now that indigo and amazon.ca’s websites’ prices are very similar, so that’s probably the motivating factor more than anything. Since it takes me 3 clicks to buy a book from a competing web site, while I may have to walk across town to save a few dollars at a physical book store.