#441 Why are Quakers the reason we have fixed prices?

Why are Quakers the reason we have fixed prices? Because Quakers believe in fairness.

The Quaker religion began in Lancashire, England in the 1650s. George Fox, the son of a weaver, was fed up with the Church of England and the society that was going through large changes after the English Civil War. He started to preach, and his followers started to grow. George Fox claimed to have had a revelation and became convinced that it was possible to hear the word of God without having to go through the church. The church didn’t like these “dangerous” ideas and he spent a lot of time in various prisons for his beliefs. As his followers grew, he started the Quaker religion, although, Quaker is not the real name. The religion is called the Religious Society of Friends. “Quaker” was a nickname that sprang up because the followers were supposed to “tremble in the way of the Lord”. Quakers were persecuted in England and many of them fled to the American colonies. Persecution stopped in England in 1689, but Quakerism had already spread to America and Holland.

Fixed pricing began in about 1850. Fixed pricing means that the price of an item is fixed no matter who buys it and where they buy it. A can of soup is the same price for a beggar or a king and the same price in Miami or Chicago. That seems like something that is obvious, but it is a fairly recent concept. When early people developed agriculture and settled down, things were bought and sold along the barter system. Money replaced this about 5,000 years ago and people could now buy and sell things using a coin or, much later, a piece of paper that represented the worth of the thing being bought or sold. However, prices were decided by the person doing the selling and haggling was a central part of buying and selling. In the same way as happens in markets in Asia today, people who look like they have more money tend to end up paying more for an item.

The Quakers believed in equality for all under God. They didn’t believe it was just for different people to pay different prices for things merely depending on their social status. They believed that greed and pride were making merchants dishonest. They believed that merchants were engaging in cheating, fraud, and deception. They also criticized Puritans, saying they were part of the problem. They realized that one way to make the merchants fair was to have a single price for a good. Quaker merchants in Philadelphia began to use the fixed-price system. It quickly became popular because people like the idea of fairness and most people don’t like to have to haggle each time they go shopping. Other merchants didn’t particularly like it, but they were losing customers. The single price system built trust with the customers. The Quakers were not trying to get a business advantage, they were trying to make an honest system. They were doing it for religious reasons, but they also wanted to enact social change.

The Quaker belief spread and in 1874, John Wanamaker started to use price tags in his department store, Wanamaker’s. It was one of the first department stores in the US and was built on a policy of truth and honesty. John Wanamaker was not a Quaker, he was a Presbyterian, but he believed in the same thing that the Quakers did. He was deeply religious. He didn’t advertise on Sundays, he honored every promise he made in adverts, he treated his staff decently, he allowed people to return goods, and he used price tags. The idea of price tags became so expected by customers that it very quickly spread around the world.

The Quakers were the first people to use a fixed-pricing system that was adopted by the rest of society, but they don’t appear to have been the first people to use fixed prices. That honor goes to Mitsui Takatoshi who owned a material shop in Tokyo in 1673. He founded the Mitsui family, which is one of the most powerful families of merchants and industrialists today. The family own banks, shops, and a host of other companies. The founder of the company, Mitsui Takatoshi decided to sell material at a fixed price for a certain amount of material. This was very different to most merchants who sold on credit with no fixed price. His system was very unpopular and it didn’t take off. And this is what I learned today.

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