Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you'll come back to buy them.
When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he's raised the prices. "I knew you were hot to buy them," the clerk says, "so I figured I could make a few extra bucks."
That's what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been doing to me.
On Nov. 6, seeking to boost my dubious culinary skills, I decided to buy "The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook." I went to Amazon and placed the book in my electronic shopping cart but got distracted and never finished the transaction.
The next day, I signed on to Amazon again. A pop-up message informed me that the price had increased from $11.02 to $11.53.
This seemed odd. In physical stores, prices of books are usually fixed, immune to fluctuation by season or whim. Indeed, they're one of the few consumer items that come with a printed price from the manufacturer.
Although the electronic world provides much greater latitude in pricing, as a longtime Amazon watcher I had never seen such an abrupt and unexplained price change. The cookbook, published two years ago by a regional press named Sasquatch Books, is decidedly obscure. Amazon's bestseller list gave it a ranking in the 18,000 neighborhood.
I checked with friends, who accessed their own Amazon accounts. They determined that the price was now $11.53 for them too. Was it conceivable that Amazon, seeing the only prospective customer in sight reaching for his wallet, decided to raise the price just a bit -- enough to help its bottom line but not enough to scare him off?
I decided on a test. I added a bunch of books, most of them newly published, most of them obscure, to my shopping baskets with both Amazon and its British affiliate, Amazon.co.uk.
On Dec. 15, I checked my shopping baskets. Nine of the U.S. books had increased in price; three had decreased. At the British branch, nine had increased and none had decreased.
The increases were modest -- often about 5%, sometimes less. But, as with "The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook," they were perplexing. Why would the journals of novelist John Fowles, published two months ago to widespread apathy, increase by $1.05?
An Amazon spokesman said the company wasn't trying to make a few extra bucks off me during the holidays, but that it otherwise wouldn't talk about its pricing strategies.
