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It’s actually so much worse than that.
With e-labels you can optimise your prices in real time, A/B testing the public across the country in minutes to optimise for the highest rate a population will tolerate indefinitely.
Then, you can offload the management of this service to a third party, which sounds daft at first, but this provides deniability when it comes to price fixing. When EvilCorp contracts with all grocers in a given province/state, they can slowly hike the price of bread by 1% every hour until they maximise profits, screwing you. They can even optimise for time of day/region/whatever, all with deniability.
Surge pricing is a distraction. The real profit is in squeezing the public slowly.
Electronic labels aren’t the issue then, lack of oversight and consumer protection is.
And, of course, the obscene imperative to make ever more profit, human cost be damned.
If there were real competition then electronic labels would be just fine. One company would try it, another would stick to fixed prices, maybe another one would encourage people to bargain on everything like ye olde days. Some people might like dynamic prices because they thought they could game the system. I certainly love picking up things in a store that are discounted.
For that kind of thing to work, you’d need at least 5 or 6 truly fully independent grocery stores that are convenient, viable options for people in a certain area, and probably 10+ in a wider geographic range for people willing to travel a bit. Instead we tend to have 2-3 companies dominating all grocery business because anti-monopoly laws are no longer enforced.
Instead we tend to have 2-3 companies dominating all grocery business because anti-monopoly laws are no longer enforced.
And we circle back to regulation…
All in all good points.
Then, you can offload the management of this service to a third party, which sounds daft at first, but this provides deniability when it comes to price fixing
That’s already happening. I’ve seen a few news stories investigating surge pricing through Instacart. Both Instacart and the stores, like Target, deny being responsible for the dynamic pricing
The prices are even based on the individual user. One person will be given a higher price for the exact same loaf of bread because the algorithm determines they’d be more likely to pay it. It’ll be interesting to see the effect that has on labor force morale. What’s the point of “working hard”* to earn more money if you’re just going to be charged more for things?
*Adding quotes and an asterisk to working hard because in many cases hard work isn’t what earns you more money. The hardest I’ve ever worked was in kitchens for near minimum wage
I agree. And it’s not just the public as a whole. My local news ran a story about how they’re going to be doing this on an individual level. The example they used was for fast food, but it would apply for what they’re doing in grocery stores as well. The example was a woman pulls up to a fast food chain with her children and their friends in the car. They order and the price is significantly increased because the AI has identified that she does this once a week on that particular day and realizes that she’s going to be willing to pay it. And then the car behind her pulls up, and they could order the same exact thing that she ordered, but they would get it for a lower price.
Individualized price surging is the fresh hell that’s even worse than applying it on the whole to a larger population.
How do they charge differently at the cashier? Like if the label changes for me after Jane picks her milk up then how does the system know that I picked up the milk at the higher price?
I’ve wondered this myself, but at a guess, I’d assume that they’d attach a 1hr window to the time change. So to use your example:
- 1400h egg price is set to £3.00
- 1445h you pick eggs off the shelf
- 1500h egg price set to £3.05
- 1515h Jane picks eggs off the shelf at £3.05
- 1530h you get to the till and pay £3.00
- 1535h Alice gets to the till and pays £3.05
Basically, so long as you’re in and out within an hour, any price rises (not drops, likely) within that hour don’t apply to you.
Alternatively, there’s a continued push to use the self scanning guns, those things you take with you in your cart as you shop. These could track the time of purchase and thus give you up-to-the-second pricing. Of course this only works if everyone has to use those things. I’m sure that’s next.
Would say—
Traditionally, with paper coupons. Now, targeted digital offers (e-coupons).
They’d face lawsuits if they changed labels during the day and folks overpaid. Harder to think of a strategy with those labels that would be truly personalized. But like paper labels, would be location dependent (how wealthy and what tastes for the surrounding area).
I work at Walmart. I deal with these tags. As a worker it has made my life easier. They are eink, they do not change instantly and the system regularly delays changes for extended periods. Can they do regular changes yes, but they were making the workers do that anyway. Your concerns are still warranted. Take a picture of your tag.
ive worked in a store that had that
it was so much time saved, compared to running around and replacing paper/stickers
And sure they COULD change the prices on random “whims” but they’d get a ton of angry customers. imagine grabbing an item for 5 bucks on the shelf, then when you get to the checkout, the price is 10?
our system only updated the prices at night
Where I live, having a price be different at checkout would actually be illegal (thank legislation), but they could still change it overnight. But they can already do that anyways…
Not only a time saver so employees can actually be available to help customers and restock shelves, but also so much less waste created. I worked for a company that had paper tags a long time ago and we threw away so much trash every week for price changes, sometimes daily. Even if the prices didn’t change, we still had to print and put out updated tags because of expiration dates. I often would wish we had digital tags.
The amount of trash not being wasted is amazing.
almost as if it requires zero human labor! I wonder if labor cost savings will happen? Think of the profit margins right there for the taking! Certainly this benefits the worker, yes? The one that isn’t laid off, sure.
Ehh, I used to work retail and do signage for my department. The amount of time spent on signage in a day wouldn’t have noticeably changed the bottom line. The extra 30 minutes we would have gained per department would have been spent on cleaning and restocking. When one person staffs your department at open, it’s not like you can go to zero because they don’t need to change price tags.
Fucking the customer and protecting them against mislabeled prices are the real wins there.
What changed the bottom line is having to pay employees to do it. I also used to work retail, and if you never had to do this, then you could probably have a least one less person on per shift
we already had 1 person on that shift, this one doesn’t go to zero.
I’m sure Walmart only has one person working at a time
In jewelry before open… yup.
Is there some law saying that the price on the sticker must be honoured? I know some of them are unauthenticated protocols and you can change them with a flipper or some random CC1101 gadget
Mass has a law stating the lowest advertised price must be honored. (Which includes in store price tags, which are required for grocery items.)
Theres also a sort of bounty system baked in- if an item scans higher, than lowest price, youre entitled to one for free/ 10$ off, setting a ceiling for the discount, (i say one because you dont get to clear out the shelf for free on a miss-mark. But my mom has, for instance, run into a friend at the grocery, who found a missprice, and was telling everyone to grab a jar of pasta sauce before she checked out because its free if you grabbed it before they fix the sign. When we went to check out, there were like 50 people claiming the free jar, and some porridge manager trying to keep up with the discounts.
Theres also a hefty punishment for not honoring that Freebie. Punishment can iirc include up to 30 in jail for staff who refused. The investigation is probably the worst though- weights and measures can and apparently will shut down a groccer for up 30 days to investigate for refusing to honor the missmark.
So here, I dont think youd see a store trying to use dynamic pricing as a short term thing (probably reset the price daily before opening though) The risk of someone documenting the price change with their phone would likely outweigh the reward of anything shorter term.
As to the flipper scenario, seems like a bad idea- the store would most likely be able to pull up logs from their price changing systems, proving they never gave that price, leaving you having just tried to defraud a government agency with your report.
You’d be better off forging a price tag, photographing it in situ at an analog store, then getting rid of it. Less direct evidence of you commiting fraud.
Seems like a high risk low reward crime. Defrauding the government / hacking charges for at max $10s
There is in my country
Though its written like:
If theres unclear pricing, like 2 prices, customers get the better deal
Ah yes those poor (checks notes) price sticker changing workers.
it was so much time saved, compared to running around and replacing paper/stickers
It’s right there in the original comment. If it saves a significant amount of time, it reduces the overall labour burden on the workers, meaning it’s likely they will require fewer workers to complete a night’s shift (restocking,
price updates, cleaning, etc.) with no real benefit to the workers considering cost savings will just be hoovered up by corporate.The benefit to the worker I not having to waste their time with doing something that could be done better, the issue is how the company responds, not the actual “work” itself going away.
The idiotic arguments I see every time jobs are automated away is just “less jobs bad”, yes in our capitalistic system where companies are insentivized the way they are I understand not having a job is worse then having one where you do stupid busy work, however that in itself is a stupid reason to bemoan any efficiency or time saving gains by actually useful technology uses.
I am a hard worker and I like to find ways to be more efficient and optimize my time spent on tasks, things like this are exactly that in theory.
That doesn’t benefit the worker at all though. It is an overall detriment to the worker class as a whole.
In this case, no one is saying “less jobs bad”. They’re saying the hording of savings from job elimination is further increasing wealth disparity, shifting money from the worker class to that of the elite. It’s not like the workers’ salaries will go up or the cost of goods will go down as a result.
I’m all for eliminating useless busy work, but the rewards of that should be reaped by those doing the actual damn work. Assuming you work for some company and not for yourself, all that time you put into being more efficient and optimal does is makes your employer more money and gives you a dopamine hit for being told you’re a good boy.
It does, as it’s one less manual thing they need to do.
You’re making exactly the argument I’m talking about, efficiency gains bad because companies always look to cut people when efficiency improves rather then investing back into their people because number must go up and shareholder value and yada yada capitalism shit.
At the lowest level, we should be happy when things are made easier or more efficient as that means we can spend less time on it and therefore should be able to now use that time for something better.
What do you want? People still working in the fields or mines at the scale they used to? It literally does not make sense. What we need is either socialism or extremely strong social benefits systems for people whose jobs are no longer relevant, its not like they got enjoyment out of those things in the first place a majority of the time it’s just to make ends meet.
What we need is either socialism or extremely strong social benefits systems
This is exactly what was implied by my previous comments. I already told you flat out that I’m for eliminating useless busy work. Why would you assume I want “people still working in the fields or mines at the scale they used to?”
Sheesh.
Choose your adventure:
- Yeah, fuck them, not everyone needs to eat, right?
- I’m sure grocery prices will lower when these poor price sticker changing workers get laid off, thus benefiting us all.
Companies being shitty with price and time saving is not the same as keeping around pointless jobs that could be done more efficiently.
Ah yes, the surge pricing only updates every 24 hours. This makes it acceptable
Well, i dont know about the rules in america
Great news for the workers who don’t get laid off as a result.
If you add surge pricing then I’ll just ramp up giving myself discount by stealing from you.
Basic necessities should be always free. Think there was a case of elderly woman collapsing at Disneyland because they confiscated water at the entrance so she just drank the cheapest drinks which were energy drinks.
Source? You owe me 20min reading about cartoon mice btw :p hehe Disney is a big rabbit hole
In Paris, it’s not unusual to see visitors strolling through Disneyland Paris with McDonald’s bags in hand. In California and Florida, Disney parks explicitly allow guests to bring in outside food and nonalcoholic drinks, as long as certain guidelines are followed.
^- https://www.disneydining.com/disney-parks-explain-enforcement-of-food-and-drink-ban-cj1/
Didn’t see collapsing lady, water should be fine, thankfully!!
Source: I saw a comment saying it on reddit 10 years ago xD
They allowed outside food/water 10+ years ago. They also have free water that you have to ask for and drinking fountains. Protip: bring a camelback.
Now I used to live near Disney world and went pretty much every week using a season pass for a year. I also rotated through a bunch of competitor park doing the same frequency.
People get heat exhausted and pass out constantly. They aren’t used to the heat or direct sunlight, humidity, or the length of queues. Florida summers on asphalt is not a joke.
I would usually see 1-2 groups dealing with heat related injuries most times I went to any theme park.
How were the energy drinks the cheapest? When it comes to non-alcoholic drinks aren’t they usually among the most expensive?
At Disneyland out of all places? How can someone afford to go to Disneyland but not to buy water there?
Edit: I guess maybe she didn’t carry any money or cards with her
It could be affording the ticket was the extent of her budget due to the price.
Confiscating water? Jesus fucking christ.
When you make stuff up, shit gets dystopian fast.
These people are cut from the same cloth as the guy that developed gas pump ads with no volume control. Hell can barely keep up with all the special circles they’ve been having to build Lately.
My hypothesis is that finding out your special circle of hell isn’t special, is part of the hellscape experience.
When I was a kid Walmart had a policy that if something rang up for more than was listed on the shelf price you would get $3.00 off the item. How times have changed.
My local Walmart doesn’t even seem to even want people shopping in the store anymore. They are constantly blocking off aisles with full pallets of products that haven’t been put away yet, the Walmart pickup workers are running through aisles and blowing through intersections with headphones on, and they never have any bags at the checkouts.
That’s because of understaffing.
Odd how Costco, which pays people well and takes care of their employees so much that people proudly share how long they’ve worked there on their name tag, doesn’t suffer from this problem.
Because Costco isn’t run for maximum short term profit. And a lot of people think it’s run poorly because of this and is an example of bad business.
The issue is what you think the endgoal of a business is.
Costco tends to focus its locations in large municipalities with high throughput, while Walmart built its business model on rural monopolization of retail where it could be feast or famine any given week. Costco optimized around sales flow, while Walmart optimized around margin per unit sold.
Both have been incredibly profitable over their lifetimes. Both have benefited from cities and states effectively paying subsidies to attract Big Box retailers that would drive out their smaller competitors. Both are, fundamentally, capitalist enterprises fixated on maximizing profit surplus.
The “problems” Walmart faces are problems pushed onto staffers and shoppers in markets where retail sales have declined. The “solutions” that Costco landed on only seem to work in wealthier and denser neighborhoods, where retail sales jobs are still the bottom rung of the economy.
Understaffing is a consequence of management and policy, not a cause by itself.
Yea turns out when the demand is high enough companies can be absolute shit to their customers, employees, and suppliers while staying in business.
The demand is only so high because they spent the last 50 years strangling local grocers to death
Yup but it’s not just food production. Like every industry is like that. Churning and burning customers and workers alike.
Walmart is not understaffed. They’re staffed precisely how much they want to be. Walmart is just a dirty, filthy store that is hostile to its customers and workers.
then take the hint.
Believe me I would love to never step in a Walmart again, but it’s literally the only option in my little rural town. I’d have to drive about 100 miles just to get to another store.
There’s always delivery.
When Georgetown Texas flooded they tripled the price of 5 gallon water jugs.
Why is everyone so angry?! Think of the shareholders you selfish fucks!
I mean it could be a precursor for that but where I live some stores have had them for over half a decade without surge pricing. But who knows
Every time I’ve worked with a customer wanting to do digital pricing labels, the end goal is what we would now call surge or adaptive pricing
Like I said, maybe it’ll happen but we have digital price stickers in almost every store because they’re just easier. Same convenience allows surge pricing but surge pricing isn’t the only reason to do it.
They’re probably doing it and you don’t notice.
It would be actual news here so you’d need someone to notice. Me, any other consumer, their workers…
I get the conspiratorial idea but I very much doubt they’ve managed to keep it secret from everyone. I’d be happy (so to speak) to be proven wrong.
If there are no laws explicitly preventing the practice then all companies who can do it are doing it.
It’d be kinda surprising since no store has been known to do it so far, so nobody has noticed or talked. And some people watch the prices and their fluctuation like hawks. Not to mention the employees.
I get the pessimistic view but I just don’t believe that myself. But like I said, (un)happy to be proven wrong though.
Just curious where you live? You may be in a more honest place.
The actual circumstances where surge pricing would be worth doing are pretty uncommon. Like, what news item would make a manager think “Oh, I should double the price of jeans for the next four hours” or “No one will care if the price of eggs is 50% higher between 7am and 11am”. Price changes longer than that, or less frequent than weekly are just price changes, and digital tags just make it happen faster, more reliably, and with less labor.
They track all purchases, and that means data they can feed into an algorithm to track typical hourly/weekly/monthly demand. If they know eggs are more in demand by X% between 7am and 11am then it certainly makes sense to charge Y% more during that time. It’s all just math.
Makes sense from a profit standpoint, you mean? Because it certainly doesn’t make sense from a standpoint of prudence, morality, ethics, community, or common sense.
Welcome to 2026. It’s been this way for a while now.
Do you think that’s how surge pricing works on apps like Uber? There’s a human watching the market and constantly making adjustments?
Or do you think it’s computerized (or nowadays, probably AI)? Which do you think is more likely?
Doesn’t matter. You still need some condition to trigger price changes. No grocery is going to change the price of bread based on the wheat futures market, because no consumer cares about wheat futures. Maybe they’d change based on their own inventory, but they can’t do that too quickly, or the price will change between the time customer picks up the product and the clerk rings it up.
There’s a whole population of people who shop in advance - visit web sites, check the store fliers, whatever - to get the best price. If a shelf price doesn’t match their researched price, they’re never going to that store again.
Aside from gas stations, grocery stores seem to have the most volatile pricing. They’re already making weekly changes on dozens of items, probably based on purchasing algorithms. Maybe that counts as retail “surge” pricing, but it’s not the dynamics that people fear when talking about digital price tags.
Just because it’s not happening constantly everywhere, doesn’t mean that it isn’t being tested some places, and isn’t coming soon.
It also doesn’t mean that it is.
Even if that’s not the goal of the current management, it’s only a matter of time before they get replaced by someone else and there’s far far more assholes in this world than good people, so it’s all but guaranteed that at some point someone will use the tech for surge pricing and adaptive pricing
Yeah in Europe these digital price tags have been common for a long time now. My local grocery store has had them for at least a decade now.
How do you know, are you personally tracking the prices of all items at every place with these tags?
I do keep track of how much things cost, yeah? I thought everyone did that. But also, kinda interesting if nobody else has noticed it either, because it would be legit newsworthy thing here if someone took up surge pricing
Everything? You pay attention to the prices of every item at every store around you? OK
Interesting you’d think every single person would have to pay attention to every single product to notice surge pricing. But it’s just one of those things that yeah, someone would notice and it would actually be newsworthy for someone to start doing that here. They’d be the first to bringing in an immediately hated practise.
But hey, maybe you’re right and they’re managed to do it without anyone knowing. You never know I guess. I just don’t believe that.
No. But in order to say, with as much certainty and conviction as you have, that it is not happening at all ever, you would.
No I wouldn’t personally have to follow every single price. Others are watching prices too, that’s just normal stuff. Not to mention the people who actually work at these stores.
What’s more likely in your opinion, that they have managed to introduce this new controversial pricing scheme without people finding out, not even their own workers, or that they’ve just not done it? I don’t know man, sounds unlikely to me.
Without anything to support it it’s just one of those conspiracy theories.
You seem to be assuming that we’re talking about massive shifts in prices, not changes of a few cents here and there to test the waters.
I have literally several years worth of notebooks full of what items costed at various locations. Paper shopping list, write the price down of the item on that specific trip at that location.
Started so I could compare costco prices to Walmart to local grocer because size and sales aren’t always guarantees of best price. My local grocer in particular often charges extra for the bulk version.
You aren’t the first to suggest this crazy but I was at one point feeding enough children that this mattered. I was using pricing to determine final cost of each meal and would drop meals in a out of rotation based purely on cost.
This was also a fun teaching opportunity, make the kids mentally add up all the prices with multiplers and coupons and try to see who gets closest to the actual total. Also to always do the math to determine per unit price whole accounting for sales and coupons.
Most of them are adults now but I still have a mental model around pricing. It’s also how I know prices have increased by 50-150%, cpi and other stats be damned.
They can charge as much as they want for the stupid bottled water, but safe drinking water should come out of the taps and be free for everyone. That’s not the case in too much of the world, no thanks to megacorps.
Places selling bottled water aren’t really selling water, they’re selling convenience. As long as water is available in a less convenient way (say tap water or even a clean stream), I don’t see the problem with selling a bottled version for people who want water they can carry with them on a bike ride or something.
I agree, to an extent, but the bottles are a serious environmental concern.
Plastic ones sure. Glass ones are pretty easy to recycle, AFAIK.
Tap water isn’t free, but yes it should be safe water.
The per unit cost of a cup of tap water approaches zero. In my area, it’s about €0.0005. This includes all the costs of extraction, purification, and distribution.
Yes, there is a water connection fee and usage rate but drinking should be offered gratis. Bring your own beaker.
why do people keep feeling the need to make this stupid distinction? we understand that things paid for by taxes aren’t without cost
Probably because in the US tap water isn’t free. If you don’t pay your water bill they cut your service with a digital valve in your yard.
I’m guessing you’re not American but we actually pay a water bill
Also in Canada, though it’s rather cheap and if you’re renting it’s something usually covered by your landlord (ofc the average cost is definitely just added into the rent price)
okay, you’re technically right, I do pay for water consumption since I am on a municipal supply
but, like, it’s so cheap to the consumer that it’s basically free, particular as it relates to drinking water consumption
It’s not even just taxes. Every place I’ve ever lived in has to pay a water bill.
Walmart should be collectivized
reminds me of the old total recall movie, where they were charging for breathable air.
They can raise it with sticker pricing too… Like just change the price and print a new sticker… Whenever they want…
Right, and they’re going to do this daily, or even multiple times per day? Not a chance without digital pricing.
Digital pricing also changes in an instant, leaving customers little or no recourse. Personally if I saw someone manually marking up an item I intended to buy by a couple dollars, I wouldn’t buy that item and maybe wouldn’t revisit the store.
Ohh this bottle of water went up $0.12, rush to the shelf! print, peel peel peel, wipe, stick
We occasionally did this at Best Buy back in the day when a neighboring retailer would put on a sale. Sometimes things would be missed in the AM adverts or it would be a local sale rather than a corporate sale, but it would be more like a $50 change on a $1000 item.
I wonder if they take into account someone putting something in their cart at one price and it changing before they reach the checkout. Like would you preserve the lower of the two prices for 15 minutes to make sure customers don’t see it changing and get mad?
The goal is to pair this with cameras and facial recognition. When you walk up to an item, it will display a price for you. When someone else does the same, they’ll get a different price. Your assigned price will be recorded to your profile and honored when you get to the register.
The goal is to be able to easily charge different people different prices for the same item. It has very little to do with changing prices for everyone over the course of the day.
it will cause some real awkward situation if someone in front of you buys the same item and got rung with a different price.
It’s so much worse than that. Algorithmic pricing represents the death of what little remains of the American dream. What’s the point of going to college, going to trade school, or working hard to improve your situation in any way? Every time you get a raise, the algorithms will figure out your income is higher, raise all the prices, and completely cancel out your salary increase. What’s the point of doing anything to better your own earning potential at that point? All jobs effectively collapse to subsistence wages, regardless of the amount you’re actually taking home. Might as well just get the least miserable job you can find and just work that until you die of old age.
The example given isn’t really a good one. When I was a kid I worked at a grocery store and I know how they did the pricing. Pricing was normally done once a week, to align with the weekly discount magazine (often in the store the current weeks discounts magazine and next week discounts magazine would be available for shoppers). Prices were switched out manually by the store manager and a couple of other people. These were small printed paper pricetags in a little plastic insert. As the people who did the price changes did thousands a week, they got really fast at it. With one flick they would remove the old tag and put in the new. So even back then the prices were changed out often. Prices were def influenced by the weather, as even back then general weather reports were accurate enough. We would usually know when really hot weather would come, or really cold weather.
But products like ice or water are a bad example anyways, as those would in fact be discounted when it’s hot out. The idea is to pull in people from the street with those promotions and have them impuls buy other things. Or draw in shoppers that would normally shop at another store, but are drawn in by the tasty looking ice cream promotion. It’s also a supply and demand kind of thing, where in the summer a lot more ice cream is being sold and thus bought in by the store. This pushes down the price, not raises it up.
I wonder if it is really worth the time of somebody at the store to micro-manage prices like that. Usually those kinds of stores have a well thought out strategy and stick to that. And in my experience cutting labour costs is more important, so they usually run with a pretty tight crew. This means nobody has time for micro-optimisations like that. Doing some other task that reduces the amount of people working there pays off much sooner. Maybe with automation in the future, but that would require very accurate stock management and I just don’t see how that’s possible in a grocery store context.
This means nobody has time for micro-optimisations like that.
That’s the point of electronic tags. Nobody has to change it. There’s an algorithm—excuse me—‘AI’ that calculates and updates the prices.
I would agree it’s going to cause all sorts problems if they try to do this more frequently than daily. The only people that won’t notice a price change from the time it goes into the cart to the register are rich people. The average customer has limited funds and pays attention.
They will just delay any increase at the register for twice the average loiter time of a shopper as no one is going to complain about a discount. Any decrease would happen immediately. If that runs afoul of any laws they will just do it daily after close.
In Canada we have had these for a while. In some stores you can even trigger an LED on the price tag from the app to help find an item apparently.
While this does seem like it sucks the horse has been out of the barn for some time. You can see it on Amazon or airline sites.
Just another way to squeeze us just a little more.
It doesn’t seem like it sucks, it objectively fucking sucks and should be illegal.
The stores that would implement this type of thing either have a local monopoly or are targeting the wealthier demographic.
My local fully employee owned grocery store would laugh all the way to the bank if their competitors push this.
yup…though there are large sections of america that are completely locked down in this respect. places where there are no local/co-ops etc. just faceless chain after faceless chain as far as the eye can see
Algorithmic pricing in grocery stores has been a thing for at least a few decades, though the specific name it went by has changed a lot.
I’d say it began with data collection via those club/loyalty cards, which offered extremely granular transaction data. Around the mid 2010s, “analytics” for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) were already commonplace to not only track, but to “nudge” you into purchases you wouldn’t otherwise, e.g. via notifications or coupons.
This infrastructure which harvests and influences people on such a large scale is arguably the most valuable asset of retailers. It’s basically what Big Tech does, after all.
Algorithmic pricing in supermarkets is newer, but Consumer reports has already caught InstaAI pricing fixing for months now.
Exclusive: Instacart’s AI Pricing May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill - Consumer Reports - https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-practices/instacart-ai-pricing-experiment-inflating-grocery-bills-a1142182490/
Weaponized psychology to create docile consumer drones.
If you are using Instacart to buy your groceries, you have no one but yourself to blame.
Might as Door Dash every single meal with the fees you payin. How lazy can you be to not even buy your own groceries?
People with disabilities and without cars exist, you know
Yes but relying on Big Tech and the “Gig” economy for their charity was never going to go well. I can not think of a more iconic duo for exploitation.
My 92 year old grandma who is legally blind manages to get to the grocery store so I don’t really feel it’s an impossibility. People have been disabled, and without cars, and gotten to the grocery market for literal centuries.
Well back then societal cohesion and family units meant they were provided for, not to mention the difference in food desert ubiquity.
Just because over reliance on a service is bad, or the service can be manipulated, doesn’t mean there aren’t any people who benefit massively from the service.
The world has changed a lot since you were a kid. Pricing is done completely differently now
Algorithmic pricing is already here if you’re purchasing through Instacart, and some stores are now directly doing it through their app. Prices are adjusted per customer, meaning you and I may be charged different prices for the exact same product simply because the algorithm determined you would be more willing to pay a higher price than me
Within a decade, that may be the universal shopping experience
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They do nothing that doesn’t increase profits. It could be anything from cutting the staff or hours needed to update pricing or surge pricing. Increasing salsa pricing while offering a minor discount on chips for a large televised sporting event or something. If they can get away with it, they’ll do it.
You need to think bigger.
Electronic Pricing allows them to charge Bill, the Carpenter $2.59 for the gallon of milk, and then charge Karen, the “FinTech” worker $5.30 for the same gallon of milk. Price charges right at register.
They’ll charge whatever they think you, as an individual, can afford.
Remember it isn’t enough to get some, most, of the majority of the money. They want ALL the money. Each individual company.
When they track your phone ID or use face recognition around the store to adjust pricing we’re fucked.
So far I am glad that Amazon’s “AI” grocery store was Actually Indians. They had all the money in the world and still couldn’t do it.
Here’s hoping the technology to do this reliably is at least a few decades out.
