Survival Strategies: After Cost Cutting, Companies Turn Toward Price Rises --- They Don't Call Them That, But Some Trim Discounts And Add New Premiums --- Charging Extra for Odd Sizes By Timothy Aeppel 1,783 words 18 September 2002 The Wall Street Journal (Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) Inside the walls of American industrial companies, something unusual is going on: an all-out search for new ways to charge more money without raising prices. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has chopped discounts to its biggest distributors, which had been taking advantage of favorable prices to undercut Goodyear elsewhere. Jergens Inc., a Cleveland industrial parts maker, has started charging big premiums for small orders of fasteners that it used to price like larger orders. Union Pacific Corp. has started charging its rail-freight customers as much as 40% extra for faster delivery. Low inflation and fierce global competition are huge barriers to price increases. But in a weak economy, many companies have already jumped through hoops to cut costs and boost productivity. So now they need to find new ways to wring more money from their customers. For many industrial companies, there's some room to maneuver because they haven't looked at pricing this way before. Their businesses have run on bulk rates charged for commodities -- some of them measured by weight -- with big discounts for big volumes. Many are used to seeing prices go down over time, not up. The quest for ways to reverse that trend has broad implications. The U.S. economy is at a delicate crossroads, recovering weakly as consumers spend big but businesses don't. Higher prices could give businesses a boost they need to get their own spending back in gear. Finding creative ways to increase prices is a more familiar tactic of consumer-product companies. Kimberly-Clark Corp. next month will start selling fewer