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Price raising in response to demand isn't always a bad thing, it cuts back on hoarding. Recall toilet paper shortages, for eg. Alternative is rationing, which cuts some folks out entirely and incentives a bunch of dumb behavior.
Boo to personalized pricing. But idk how eager I am to get out the tomatoes.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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 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.
If you add surge pricing then I’ll just ramp up giving myself discount by stealing from you.
reminds me of the old total recall movie, where they were charging for breathable air.
When Georgetown Texas flooded they tripled the price of 5 gallon water jugs.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Walmart "we're noticing a large increase in theft of the products we're trying to gouge people on, strange."
... we've had those for ... 5 or 10 years?
But iirc surge pricing in stores isn't allowed ... I should check that actually ... :|
Walmart should be collectivized