Boots got in some serious Twitter trouble this week over the price of their morning after pill.
Boots’ biggest rivals, Superdrug and Tesco, both recently lowered their prices of their morning after pill to around £13. But Boots stayed committed to its original prices of £28.25 for Levonelle, the most popular branded version, and £26.75 for its own brand – almost £15 higher than its rivals.
More than the fact that it's a lot of money, it's the reason for why Boots won't lower its prices that's pissed people off. But ironically enough, the reason they're keeping it expensive is to not piss other people off. It basically boils down to whether you think people should be dissuaded from buying the morning after pill by a high price. In a letter to the British Pregnancy Advice Service, Boots said it already receives a lot of criticism for just stocking the pills – by making the product cheaper, some people might argue they're encouraging women to buy it. A high price makes it a last resort, rather than something women can use often.
Should stores be using prices to tell women what to do...?
Normally, a price is made up of a few different things. How much the product costs to produce is the most obvious part. Then there’s how much other people are charging for it – lots of competition for a product might decrease a price, for example, because different manufacturers are competing for people's money. And then there’s the simple question of how much people are willing to pay for it.
But Boots is going out on a limb and adding another factor to the mix – morals. The competition are charging less, which means you can produce it for less, and people are happy with the price – so technically, the 'value' of the product has already been decided by everyone else but you. But if you've got a moral reason to put the price higher, it's what economists call an 'artificial' price – higher than the actual value of the product.
Usually, the only people who would mess with prices like this are governments trying to disincentivise people from buying a product that's bad for the public in some way – like sugar, or cigarettes. The UK government also talks a lot about banning supermarkets from selling dirt-cheap booze.
But it's pretty unsteady territory for a store to do the same, and critics are saying that using their pricing to police behavior is really overstepping the mark. A letter from a group of MPs said: “This infantilises women, Boots' largest customer base, and suggests Boots take a moral position against women's choices which is unacceptable." A lot of angry tweets and letters later, Boots apologised and said it would adjust its prices back to the 'real' value.
