Here you're talking about price discrimination (separation of markets) rather than dynamic/surge/prime pricing within a single market. These are fundamentally different concepts.
I'm imagining a future where to get even the most basic everyday things done you'd have to store in your head the pricing models of dozens of companies, including understanding of their pricing algorithms (whether it's demand-based or preference-based or whatever-based). Simply navigating pricing structures will become a major time sink in everyone's life.
You know the pain it is to book airline tickets? The pricing instability where some plane tickets get cheaper as you approach the flight date but some get vastly more expensive, and tickets are cheaper on some weekdays but not others? Yeah, imagine that, extended to every facet of your life, even small everyday transactions.
What a nightmare.
(Though sorites paradox.)
The gas price doublers might get the news and the local representatives being outraged, but, empirically, few care about smaller instances of price discrimination.
Customers will hate companies (and punish them in the marketplace) if they feel nickel-and-dimed or taken advantage of.
In the UK on the other hand, all train lines are private,and they charge whatever they like if there is demand. So a morning train to London will cost hundreds of pounds if bought 5 minutes before departure,but only 20 pounds if bought 3 months in advance. I find this offensive on the deepest level. I understand that this is how capitalism works,but it is against human freedom and flexibility, in order to do nothing else but maximize corporate profits.
In Japan, by contrast, the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka costs around Y14,000 (~US$140), every day, all the time. So at unpopular times, the trains are half empty, because people fly or take highway buses or drive instead, all of which are slower and less environmentally friendly, but deregulated and thus cheaper. I find this offensive on the deepest level.
The consumer only stands to lose. Travel at a busy time and pay more. Travel at normal times for normal fares. Travel at low times for... normal fares.
I think you got tricked into believing that you are getting a deal. You are not. The "dirt cheap" fare is what the regular/full fare should be, it's not a promotion or a good deal.
The problem with Shinkansen pricing is that its always expensive. There is no surge pricing,but the baseline price is still too expensive. That is an entirely different problem altogether.
Why? Just because you say so?
What if the "dirt cheap" fare, offered all the time, wouldn't even cover the costs of running the line?
Is your salary higher than you absolutely need to survive? If so, how do you justify your demand-based rate hike?
But I look at this stuff in aggregate - surge pricing on Uber, primetime on Lyft, this service on AirBnb, etc etc, and I get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
The utopian technocratic future Silicon Valley is bringing about seems to be one where every merchant everywhere is maximizing every penny they can extract from you at every moment, where everyone spends an inordinate amount of brain cycles trying to defeat pricing algorithms, driving an increasingly maddeningly complicated web of price-maximizers so complex and pervasive you have no chance of understanding what's going on.
Individually these things all seem rational and understandable, but as a whole where do we draw the line? As what point do I pick up a chocolate bar and watch its price tag change in front of my eyes because the system knows I have a weak spot for Snickers?
This seems dystopian to me, and perhaps more dystopian than this possible future is the fact that a lot of people in our industry would wet their pants in joy at the thought of that future.