David Sedaris Quotes

The intriguing aspect of food charges on airlines is that they create the perfect laboratory for any economist who wishes to study the question of how to price a good that possesses, by universal consensus, absolutely no objective value.

Human nature says that you want a bargain, whether you want the goods or not. You think that something is a steal, you'll buy it.

I priced my books at what I would want to spend on an electronic book.

Things that price at $4.99 sell very differently than things that price at $5.

Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.

It is widely accepted and understood that consumer decisions are as much influenced by emotional attachments to a product or service as by factors like price and performance. So why is it that when it comes to most aspects of human transportation, the world still seems to believe people are rational machines?

I don't believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they've never heard before. That's just unreasonable.

For somebody for whom they're going to buy a certain amount of gas irrespective of the price, should they really spend so much time thinking about the price of gas? It doesn't affect anything they do.

People don't buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.

My instinct is to assume that we consumers are an inconsistent bunch. We like competition if it delivers low prices, but grumble if it delivers the bad news that prices need to go up.

Truth is, people like buying things for $0.99 and $1.99 for their digital devices. We know that from iTunes. We know that from the app store, and now we know that from publishing.

If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.

Pricing is actually a pretty simple and straight forward thing. Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product.

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

The salability of an item can often be improved while the value itself remains unchanged.

As much as I'd love to give everybody a really cheap option, it's just simply not possible in certain sorts of extreme events... I guarantee that our strategy on surge pricing is the optimal way to get as many people home as possible.

Sunk costs? We pay too much attention to them.

You don't need Math to do business reporting. Business is all about choices that consumers make.

For me personally, I cannot spend a certain amount of money on anything but shoes, a coat, a purse, and that's it. I could never spend more than $1K on a sweater. I'm only going to wear it twice. But you go online, and you see incredibly expensive sweaters selling out constantly.

You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.

Customers are extremely savvy. They don't want to pay more.

To study consumer behavior is to explore human nature at its most fundamental level using the modern world as its backdrop.

Buying involves decision-making. It's a performance activity, like sports or acting.

The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.

We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.