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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasamcarl" data-source="post: 987445" data-attributes="member: 1251">You still don't seem to get my point. This is probably my fault, because i'm assuming you've had exposure to certain abstract business/economic concepts. I think if you understood what I was getting at, you would see that what i'm proposing actually helps you and 'harms' the customer.The reason why you add a membership, in addition to the normal arrangment is to seperate the customers, or have them sort themselves into a high demand and low demand group. The key to this setup is to force the high demand group to pay more, but allow for discounting to bring in low demand customers, yet to ensure that both have an incentive to stick with their plan. What you do is take the aggregate annual profit assuming non-discounted prices from your 'regulars', and make that a membership fee. Then sell the books at cost for those customers. They will be rewarded for purchasing at scale and your profits will not decrease, because you will not be taking a loss with the larger number of books they buy, but will be receiving the same profit minus a discount scheme. Through in 'premium' access to playing tables just to accentuate the bargain you are handing them. You might even be able to raise the membership fee, depending on how much value this adds to them.Low demand, 'irregular' customers will not opt into this because they would be paying a large fixed cost and only spread it over a small number of products. Instead, based upon whatever competition is out there, you discount the rate at which they are paying on monthy or bi-monthly scheduels inorder to attract them. You might only be making a marginal product off of these 'light' customers, but that doesn't matter, because your regulars are paying full price. This is an ultra-simplistic take on how secondary price-discrimination works; it assumes that you have to very disimmilar types of customers. Realistically, you would probably have to discount the hardcore to a lesser degree that the irregulars. The problem with traditional discounting is that you might increase the number of books an irregular customer would purchase, but you are getting away with allowing your regulars to pay that price, despite the fact they would have payed undiscounted for matters of convenience; they probably hang out at the store a lot anyway, they like to experiment with a lot of games on the fly, etc.There are obviously still price pressures that force discounting in this scheme, but it would allow a store to leverage its brand and position and exploit the relative inelasticity of its demand curve. Basically, you still discount, but you do so efficiently.</blockquote>

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