I’m visiting the Valley next week in connection with the what-next project, flying on some of the hundreds of thousands of points I’ve built up on some bankrupt airline or another, but I needed to rent a car out of SFO. A bit of Internet shopping produced what I thought was a fairly mind-boggling result.

I went to Budget because in a previous corporate life I used to use them all the time and have a frequent-user card (also you sometimes got an upgrade to a Jaguar, yummy), but they were $50/day and up which seemed a little steep. So I went to the nearest travel megasite and gave ’em the specs:

Care rental rate spread

(Those are Canadian dollars by the way, divide by 1.3). That’s pretty surprising. Everything I’ve ever learned about economics and marketplaces says that this kind of pricing spread is untenable. This clearly can’t go on.


author · Dad
colophon · rights

January 09, 2004
· Business (126 fragments)
· · Internet (112 more)

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