The world most of us have known has been
a price tag world.
Everything has a price -- one price.
But if you take the long view, that's a bizarre
aberration.
For a long time, we lived in a world where
customers and shopkeepers
haggled over most transactions.
And there's a good reason
things were like that.
If a customer needed a lower price on something,
they'd do their research, say,
"Hmm, I bet I can get a good price off these suckers."
And spend the time making their case to the clerk.
But if a rich person thought, "
You know, time is money;
I'm too busy to waste my time haggling."
They'd pay more not to haggle.
Everyone paid what they thought was reasonable,
and the shopkeepers made a profit.
Everybody won.
That's the way things were for centuries,
and just about everyone accepted it.
Everyone except the Quakers.
The Quakers thought charging 
different people different prices
for the same thing was morally wrong.
So they did this radical thing in a Quaker
store: They said, "Each item has one price.
The price is just the price."
And it was a moral stance, but they were ahead
of the times economically too.
See, in the 1800s businesses started getting
bigger and bigger, and haggling got to be
a hassle for the stores and the customers.
For instance, it took years to train clerks
to work in haggling stores.
When you own your own store you know everything
you need in order to haggle.
But when you add help, it takes time to learn.
You know, how much you paid for the stuff
you're selling.
How much other people are selling it for.
How to stand your ground on your price or
else you're going to get totally ripped off.
So clerks spent years learning and training,
which was costly to the shopkeepers and in turn
probably drove up the prices.
"Just a bit higher than I thought,
that's all."
"Hmmm."
So finally, around 1870, a few people took
the plunge and broke from the haggle world.
They took that Quaker idea of one price one
step further, and invented the price tag.
The little piece of paper that tells you the
final price.
And it was't about fairness anymore.
It was about building really big stores.
There were two stores that especially pioneered
the price tag.
Maybe you've heard of them?
Macy's in New York, and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia.
Macy was a Quaker.
And though Wanamaker wasn't, he was trying
to build a store in Quaker country Philadelphia,
and he became a price tag evangelist.
He felt it was the fair thing to do; it was
good for hiring
and it was good for the customer, too.
No more arm wrestling every time you wanted
to buy something.
And customers loved it.
The price tag spread until it was everywhere.
And from that day on, we've lived in a price
tag world.
Everything has one price.
(Except, I guess, if Uber is surging.)
