Statement provided by The Princeton Review
For each online test prep tutoring service in question, The Princeton Review offers four
different prices, based entirely on the geographical region in which the product is
offered. These geographical delineations are not drawn at the neighborhood level, but
instead are entire cities, regions or states, where pricing is not determined by an
algorithm, but by the differential costs of running our business and the competitive
attributes of the given market. This is a ubiquitous practice across all commerce, both
online and offline. For example, our product costs more in New York City and the
surrounding area than it does anywhere else in the country, just as virtually every good
or service does, be it gasoline, rent or eggs. No region is a perfect cross-section of the rest
of the country, and the areas that experience higher prices will also have a
disproportionately higher population of members of the financial services industry,
people who tend to vote Democratic, journalists and any other group that is more heavily
concentrated in areas like New York City than in the rest of the country at large. But to
equate the incidental differences in impact that occur from this type of geographic based
pricing that pervades all American commerce with discrimination misconstrues both the
literal, legal and moral meaning of the word.