I had long heard that in the Washington, DC area, service providers would charge more to customers they considered to be in better-off areas than to others. Often, since I live in northern Virginia, the story was that generally people were charged more for the same job in Virginia than in neighboring Maryland. True? I never confirmed it.
But Washington Post columnist John Kelly seems to have found that there is some foundation for this belief. I quote him here in full because a link might not lead you to the right spot (this is one of several items in his column of September 18):
Ratepayers
“The Potomac rate.” Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard that expression.
What is it? It’s what happens when a plumber, electrician or other service
provider pulls up to your house, sees that you live in a nice part of town,
figures you earn a decent salary and decides to charge you more than what he’d
charge someone who lives in a different Zip code.
Does that really happen?
“I think most firms don’t do that,” said Robert Krughoff,
president of Washington Consumers’ Checkbook. “But there are firms of
all kinds.”
Some firms, Robert said, “try to squeeze every penny out of a customer, and
one way to do that is to, first of all, have flexible pricing and, second of
all, to pass judgment on the customer based on something they see. And a home is
certainly such a thing.”
The challenge with evaluating the cost of a service is that it isn’t like
buying a gallon of milk. “It’s not like going in and seeing a price on a shelf,”
Robert said. “People have to shop around.”
Getting estimates from multiple companies is critical, he said. His
organization does undercover price comparisons and often finds a huge swing
between the lowest and highest quote for the same job. For example, when it
rated plumbers in 2009, the job I needed done — reseating a leaking toilet — had
a range of $70 to $347. I paid $317.
Here’s the real kicker: “We find no relationship between quality and price in
local service markets,” Robert said.
So, it's certainly true that prices can vary wildly for the same job. Is this geography-based? Very possibly. Check out the follow-up column Kelly wrote after hearing from several of his readers. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence out there, plus at least one contractor who admits it happens.
So much data is available in the 21st century, regarding things we used to consider private; our income levels for one thing, and our political preferences for another. The former leads to variable pricing for services; the latter to ever-more-extreme gerrymandering of electoral districts. The best advice, I suppose, is to get several estimates for work you need done. You might also want to check sites like Angie's List, which ask their raters to indicate the prices they pay.
Even that won't fully guarantee you're treated equally if you live in a "posher" zip code. And, it's a trend that may get worse. Many of the smaller, family-owned local businesses who provide services ranging from plumbing to HVAC may not have full access to all the sophisticated data-plucking that bigger outfits can use; but some day they probably will.