A Boring Dystopia

Ideally they should keep prices locked for 24 hours between changes

Its funny everyone shits the bed that prices might go up when low margin grocers raise prices, but the Fed is out there pumping out 8% more money supply a year, and they further increase that printing if that money simply bids up stocks or home values.

Then they think its grocery stores raising prices 30c that's making billionaires trillionaires, not the annual 8% money supply growth actively debasing peoples wages. When you're measuring things in a rapidly expanding commodity what did people expect would happen?

Ironically, these "digital labels", although problematic in their own right, could help with that.

1. Currently if the store employees have missed a price change on a product, it might actually cost more than the sign says

2. It would be pretty to easy to make those include tax IF these digital labels know which store they're in.

I feel like it's one of those things that someone came up with the benign idea first, and then later some jackass was like "Hey, we could use these to change the prices every time a customer looks at it."

Best buy and other stores have genuinely already been using these for ages.

I've worked retail and one of the things that baffled me was just how wasteful price tags were.

They change SO OFTEN and it's so much paper and plastic just tossed it the trash every time. Never even thought about it until I worked at a store and had to change them.

They actually have some neat features, if implemented. There's one where you can scan a QR code to go right to the product page where you can get, among other things, more verbose allergen info, reviews, or, if the product is out of stock where you scanned it, it can give you similar alternate products or stores that have stock.

It can also allow you to go on to the website, find your item, and ask the pricetag to flash.then you can look for the flashing pricetag if you can't find the item on the shelf.

I once worked retail and it was a pain to run around printing labels for hours. Granted, I got paid by the hour, so there were much worse things to do.

I also don't believe this is a nefarious plot, but it does enable dynamic pricing. Stores are creepy these days, they have sensors and network hardware that can track you in the store. They also can do facial recognition.

So they know who you are, where you are / where you went, what you ultimately buy (just enter your rewards number!). So they could literally see someone coming and raise prices on certain items as they enter the store.

Not to say that is a strategy companies are actively employing, but all the pieces are there.

Reference to help you sleep at night: https://documentation.meraki.com/Wireless/Operate_and_Maintain/User_Guides/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Location_Analytics

"...not talking about price segmentation..."

Yet.

That's how they get ya

Actually, they'll start with surprise specials and flash deals, like KMart used to do with their blue light specials. They will use it to discount over-stock as it gets near the sell-by date.
And then, once they've got you used to the prices changing at random times, maybe even getting people to come back in shop in the store more often but offering really great deals (like black Friday started out) . Then they will begin to have "peak pricing", where you pay more on busy days and times.

If the price of an item was changed after I pull it off the shelf, I'm telling the cashier to take the item out of my order; and the company can deal with the logistics of restocking the item. For future shopping trips I'm using my smartphone to snap a picture of every price tag as I'm putting an item in my cart. Failure to honor the price on the tag when I pulled it off the shelf is met with me walking the fuck out of the store with nothing. Now you can cancel the entire order and restock a whole cart of groceries. Let's see how many man hours of labor you save then.

You're at Walmart doing grocery shopping, and you fill your cart with all kinds of foods. Are you going to realize the tomatoes are ringing up at $2.51/lbs when the label was $2.40 in?

I don't think it would be illegal, the price tag is not a contract and it's often mislabeled today. The question is, can you get people to accept that the price will go up or down before you checkout, and will they just pay when it goes up or create a new stock return inventory?

If the chicken you've been walking around the store with went up and you decided you didn't want it anymore, that's straight to the trash. What products will they target with this?

I think it's more likely to go down during the day to compete with other stores than to go up on you, but who knows what these greedy fucks are going to do.

so they are kinda already pulling it online. amazon does it. but like, they let me know when the price of something in my basket changes immediately. big notification.

very different from putting it in your cart and finding out at the checkout. now if you need to make a substitution... godsdammit we gotta go wait in line again? if they do that, they gotta put something on the carts to ding you when something changes or i'll lead the riots myself.