Publicity and comparison shopping remain the consumer’s best weapons against price gouging.
The most notorious example of this in 2015 was the Internet flogging of Michael Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.
He’s the high-finance punk who shamelessly raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 last year, just because he could. Daraprim treats a rare disease caused by a parasite that attacks people with low immunity from AIDS or HIV.
Once Shkreli’s sins splashed into cyberspace, another drug company, Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, offered an effective alternative to Daraprim for $1 per pill, while proclaiming that they would still make a profit selling their similar brand for $99 per 100-count bottle, according to CEO Michael Baum.
Many of us subsequently felt vindicated upon seeing video of Shkreli being led away in handcuffs by FBI agents who charged him with securities fraud for bilking and lying to investors in an alleged Ponzi scheme.
That’s because the allegations against Shkreli, though unrelated to the drug prices of Turing, reinforced our suspicions that greed was Shkreli’s prime motivation, and that there was no reasonable explanation for the outrageously high prices.
Which got me to wondering: How do we know whether a price is justifiable or ridiculous?
Take tires, for example. My wife was recently a victim of sticker shock when she had to buy a single tire for her small SUV at a cost of $277.
That’s just one tire, mind you.
Come on! I can buy a laptop computer for that amount. Or a 32″ flat screen TV! Why should a single tire be so expensive?
I searched for answers in automotive chat sites, where I learned that Department of Transportation fees and taxes do add somewhat to the bottom line for a tire.
And there were many lectures or sermons by car buffs about how tires are where the “rubber meets the road,” so that passengers’ lives depend on the tires, and that you can’t put a price on safety, blah, blah, blah.
Well, my bicycle helmet is also a key component to my safety. But I can still get one for as little as $20 from just about any place that sells Schwins.
So we did what all careful consumers do nowadays — instead of sighing and handing over the Master Card, we commenced a Google comparison shopping spree.
No, we did not expect to find a new tire at a fraction of the cost, as with Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, but surely there had to be something, somewhere, that was more affordable.
The tire itself didn’t seem like anything extraordinary — an 18-inch-diameter, all-season radial with an expected tread life of 60,000 miles.
And our Google search found dozens of similar tires with the same diameter, width and speed rating, for prices that were much lower, at an approximate average of $149 per tire.
The sticking point, though, is that though there were numerous competitors to choose from, our regular mechanic recommended matching the original tires exactly, so as not to throw off the vehicle’s ride or steering because of a different tread pattern.
I have a good mechanic whom I trust implicitly, which seemed to dictate getting the same tire by the same company for $277. That also meant the tire barons win, and we lose.
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Hold on. Why not get four new tires from a different, but reliable, American company at $149 each? Sure, it might be a higher initial expense, but wouldn’t we save in the long run, and certainly as soon as we’d driven 60k?
While I contemplated this automotive version of an onside kick, a Wal-Mart ad suddenly popped up on my computer screen, listing the same size tire we’d been searching for, and manufactured by the same original company, for just $139.
When rushing to phone in my order, to make certain the offer didn’t disappear into cyber space, I asked and got the reason for the sudden and fortuitous 50 percent price cut — my particular model was being discontinued by the manufacturer.
The moral of the story? Ask questions, shop around and compare. And make sure, above all, to turn OFF your browser’s pop-up blocker!
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is a professor emeritus of English at the College of DuPage.