*Does Anyone Know What Paper Towels Should Cost?** * /Online shopping was supposed to give consumers more power and freedom. Instead, costs are so fluid that household goods fluctuate almost like Bitcoin./ By Daisuke Wakabayashi Feb. 26, 2022 When a holiday toy catalog from Amazon arrived in the mail in late October, Krista Hoffmann noticed something amiss. In 100 pages of Lego sets, princess castles, action figures and the impossible-to-find Sony PlayStation 5, the catalog presented just about everything — except the prices. “At first, I thought I wasn’t looking close enough, so I flipped through a few more pages,” said Ms. Hoffmann, a stay-at-home mother of three children in Colorado Springs. “Then I realized, ‘Oh, this is intentional.’ Why would you not put the prices there?” The absence of prices was not an oversight; it was the natural evolution of two decades of online shopping. In the early days of the internet, there was breathless excitement that e-commerce would lead to greater price transparency, allowing shoppers to know exactly where to find the best deals. This was supposed to be good for consumers and bad for retailers forced to compete with one another in a profitability-killing race to the lowest prices. Instead another reality has emerged: Shoppers are losing sight of what things cost. […] Continua qui: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/technology/amazon-price-swings-shopping.h...