Perfect Price Discrimination
By J. Pierce

My workplace has a program where ‘professionals’ get a 10% discount if they buy over a hundred dollars worth at one time.  These ‘professionals’ are either white employers of Latino workers or self-employed “small white business owners”.  The self-employed get to ride the coat tails of capitalism - buying personal items with a trade discount - while wage slaves, mostly immigrants, must buy everything at full price.  
There is a separate program whereby the customer sets up an ‘account’ with the store and receives their break as well.  These customers get a 10% discount if they buy over a thousand dollars a month.  These customers don’t have to work in the industry. They just have to be rich.  Just one more application of what I call the “preferred customer discount”.
At a previous job, my fellow workers and I delivered wholesale produce to restaurants. My boss charged each restaurant owner a different price for similar shit.  Prices were pegged to, um, let’s call it, English Language Proficiency. White restaurant owners got the best prices and the best shit. Then Mexican owners. Then Korean and Chinese, generally. Black restaurantuers and other non-white English speakers fell somewhere in the middle. I try never to shed tears for business owners of any racial group. But I learned quickly who were and were not the “preferred customers” in this industry.  Mom behind the register, Dad on the grill, and child translating the invoices were not preferable, indeed.

Not only was the race-price hierarchy in effect, but fancy restaurants got the best produce at the cheapest prices.  My suspicion was that the boss wanted to claim, “I deliver to So-and-So’s White Bistro X.”   The deep discounts and the bending-over-backwards (by us!) put our bottom feeder capitalist in the same pond with Portland’s Restaurantuer elite.

It goes down the same way at my current job in the Bay Area.  There’s a Piedmont – Oakland Hills elite that gets their discount every time.  How much does 10% off amount to?   Well, the local government’s take is 8.75%. So that means our “preferred customers” skipped out on the local sales tax. So who then has to foot the bill for the new jail or a pay raise for the cops? You guessed it: the same people who can’t afford to buy over $100 worth of shit each time.

I have a suspicion that this same “preferred customer discount” occurs over and over again, in every industry. At the hotel I worked at, the rich would get a special “corporate rate”.  If they ‘knew’ the boss (eg: So-and-So) they’d get a “manager’s special”.  But take a step back to view the logic of it.  On the one hand the “preferred customer” system is racist. We’ve all seen it.  But on the other hand it’s the simple mechanics of capitalism: charge the customer what they’re “willing” to pay. Straight out of the textbook!  Now we see what the bourgeois economists really mean - when they talk about “perfect price discrimination.”