This Week's Pricing Wrap

There were a couple of interesting pricing stories that caught my attention this week. You may recall my posting on the 20th August which talked about a couple of UK supermarkets possibly being a bit too demanding on their suppliers during a price war earlier this year.

Well, the UK supermarkets are under the spotlight again, this time for (apparently) fixing dairy prices. The BBC carried the story on their website here, while The Independent’s story may be accessed from here. An accompanying piece carried by The Independent asks “The Big Questions: Have supermarkets become just too powerful in Britain?" Good question, the article presents both sides of the argument, but at the end of the day, I think the customer will decide.

The other big story of the week came from The Guardian that reported that Rupert Murdoch is (still) considering the possibility of making the content of wsj.com (The Wall Street Journal) available for free. In my opinion, wsj.com is perhaps the best monetised site on the web, however, as the article points out, the trend is in the opposite direction:

- The LA Times has recently dropped fees, and

- The New York Times has also recently stopped charging for TimesSelect (its archive and influential columnists), which has over 200,000 subscribers.

I wonder whether these developments will be digested by the folks at the Australian Financial Review, who on Friday admitted that they had got their site wrong (www.afr.com.au) (too much Flash, little free content). The site will go through its second overhaul this year in the next couple of weeks – it will be interesting to see if pricing is part of that overhaul.