Funding for this podcast comes from Math Works, creators of Mat Lab and Simulink Software,

accelerating the pace of engineering and science. Learn more at Math Works.

Come. Support for this podcast comes from Math Works, a company accelerating the pace of

engineering and science. Stick around until the end of this episode for a special

segment about how one company is using Mathworks software to revolutionize

outer space navigation.

Back in the year 2000, Amazon launched a quiet little experiment.

For six days, between August 31st to September 5th,

Amazon varied prices on 68 DVDs.

DVD's, it kind of tells you how far back this was.

But anyway, the price is varied from customer to customer for the same DVD. But people

felt something didn't quite smell right, so they compared prices and chat rooms and were outraged.

Amazon issued refunds to almost 7,000 customers because of this.

The company also issued an apology.

This random testing was a mistake and we regret it, founder Jeff

Bezos said in a statement, quote, we've changed our policy to protect customers.

And then he added this clarification, quote, we never

tested and will never test prices based on customer demographics. Well a quarter

century later that customer uprising kind of seems almost quaint

doesn't it? These days Amazon changes prices across its platform millions of times a day, but the company insists, just as

Bezos did back in 2000, that it never changes those prices based on customer

demographics.

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