You're a travel agent. You're sitting in your storefront office, and you see a well-dressed couple park a BMW outside and walk toward your door. You reach over to your rotating brochure rack and give it a gentle spin so that the safari tours and river cruises are facing the front.
Are you an evil merchant?
Now suppose you run a website that sells travel, and you discover that Mac users spend more on hotels than PC users. You tweak a display algorithm for Mac users to give more prominence to upscale hotels and/or more expensive rooms.
Now are you an evil merchant?
There are people in the world who would answer "yes" to one or both of these questions.
Don't listen to them.
Orbitz recognized the different booking patterns of Mac and PC users a while ago, as Arnie Weissmann reported in his column in these pages eight weeks ago [From the Window Seat: "De-averaging, microsegmentation and pillows with rocks," May 7].
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But after the story landed on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal last week, bloggers and tweeters went crazy.
Some of them completely misunderstood what Orbitz was doing. One warned that Orbitz would "charge Mac users ... up to 30% more," which was simply untrue. Orbitz is not charging Mac users more for the same booking.
But it is presenting more expensive options more prominently to Mac users, much as a retail merchant would put the best stuff on an eye-level shelf.
Although the Journal report found "significant differences ... on the first page of results," Orbitz explained to USA Today that "we are not using Mac vs. PC to drive different sort order," but rather to personalize an optional list of "recommendations."
In any case, users retain the ability to sort by "value," price, distance, star rating or user ratings, and to filter the results by type of hotel, brand and other factors. You don't get to do that with the shelves in a store.
One blogger, evidently desperate to say something damaging about this practice, said it needlessly injects a new source of "suspicion" into the online shopping experience. Maybe that's precisely what online shopping needs: consumers who are a little more alert.
It has remained a mystery to us, and to many people in travel, that consumers who complain that they can't find a trustworthy agent can brag in their next breath that they bought something from a robot and "got the best deal."
There persists among cybernauts a myth that Internet commerce is or ought to be more rarefied, more pure, more transparent, more free of suspicion and "bias" than commerce of the more mundane sort.
As one commentator put it, "Revelations like this one can shatter the facade of public opinion about the Web. That is, the Web is supposed to be neutral and a website should be serving up the same search results and information regardless of platform or browser."
This is a dangerous notion. The minute we enshrine the expectation that the Web is "supposed" to be anything, we invite government regulators to make it so.
Let Orbitz be Orbitz. If its customers distrust it, they will go elsewhere, and that is as it should be.
And if they trust it, it should be because Orbitz earns their trust, not because it happens to be a dot-com.