·By Linran YU
Why Good Customers Sometimes Pay More
Chase the leavers, charge the loyal.
The offer goes to the person who stopped. Not to the one who orders every week. That is the rule, not an oversight.
How the machine decides
Campaigns are scored on incremental lift: the sales the offer caused, not the sales that were coming anyway.
The model sorts people into four groups.
Sure things, who buy either way
Lost causes, who never buy
Persuadables, who buy only if pushed
Sleeping dogs, who get worse if you contact them
Remind someone of a subscription they forgot to cancel and you lose money by speaking up.
A coupon to a weekly customer only teaches them to wait. The discount goes to the persuadables and the ones who left.
Not malice, arithmetic
Pricing runs on the same idea: you are a probability, not a person. Consumer Reports had 174 volunteers check fares on the same rideshare routes in March and April 2026. The median gap between the cheapest and most expensive groups of riders was about 42 percent. Same route, same time, different people.
Exit, voice, and loyalty
In 1970, the economist Albert Hirschman described two things an unhappy customer can do: exit, or voice.
How the machine answers:
Exit: leave, and a win-back offer comes after you
Voice: speak up, and you may get an apology
Loyalty, the third word in his title, is not a third option in the machine’s system: it is what keeps someone in the room complaining instead of walking out. The loyal customer who stays quiet teaches the system one lesson: this one does not need to be paid.
Hirschman’s other point: voice carries weight only when the other side believes you could leave.
Point it at your competitor
Your competitor’s oldest and best customers often pay more than the new ones, and nobody has thanked them. You know the feeling from the other side: the bill that drifts up every year, while the same company advertises a lower price to strangers. Nothing is holding you there except the trouble of leaving.
How do you know when their contract renews? You ask. “When does your current contract come up?” is a normal question, and most people answer it. Write the date down even when the answer is no — that is the one thing a no is good for.
Then go to them in the month before renewal, holding your competitor’s new-customer price.
The machine’s blind spot
Every offer the machine funds has a code attached to it. A referral does not.
When someone tells a buyer “I have worked with them, they are good,” nothing enters the report. No code, no number, no line in the budget. The cheapest customer you will ever get is the one the system cannot see. So keep count of them yourself.
Sources: Consumer Reports, Different Prices for the Same Ride, June 2026 — press release; full report. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Harvard University Press, 1970).