The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.
“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.
Apps like Uber already use surge pricing, in which higher demand leads to higher prices in real time. Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently. Electronic shelf labels allow the same strategy to be applied at grocery stores, but are not the only reason why retailers may make the switch.
If it’s hot outside we can raise the price of water…”
Holy fuck dude that’s some endgame capitalism right there.
Is it price gouging if there is a heat advisory is my question, and how enforceable is that. For water it’s just cruel, especially in places with little access to drinkable tap water.
The fucked up thing is that it’ll have to get legislated. Like there will be a bill that says you can’t price gouge on water in a heat advisory.
And the more fucked up thing is that it’ll be controversial.
And then you realize that this is why we can’t have nice things. We can’t all just play nice together on our own, no, as much as we all claim to hate daddy government, we need him to come down and remind us that shit like this is anti-human and start defining rules that really should have just been common decency in the first place.
Like how I feel when I tell my younger kid to stop throwing forks in the house. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. I told you yesterday, and the day before. And I told you three times today to stop throwing things. And then I get forked in the arse.
My answer to Walmart’s greed is… Some of us don’t buy bottled water, so feel free to raise it to $100 a bottle.
right, but some people do, and by encouraging this, you’re fucking over your fellow humans.
edit: There are also situations where you don’t have a choice but to buy water bottles. maybe you’re out of your home, your personal bottle is empty, and it’s hot out. maybe you’re at the airport. sure you could drink from water fountains, but what if they’re nowhere near you? or what if they don’t work?
Also if you live in, say, Flint, MI, you have reason not to trust the tap water.
I supposed it depends on the country, but as far as I know in most of Europe you can just enter a coffee shop or the local equivalent and ask for a glass of tap water.
Mind you, even though I bought a metal water bottle years ago and almost never buy bottled water nowadays, as you say sometimes it happens that one needs, though its rare and it’s highly unlikely I would be going to a supermarket to buy water.
So what if you placed some water in your cart, walked around and then they raise the price before you check out? How does that work?
They’re going to end up with a bunch of people complaining to the manager about the price not matching the sign, which already happens, but it’ll be 10x worse.
The thing that sucks is that the managers aren’t going to be the ones with the power to do that. Then again, all of my managers were spineless as fuck when I worked in a grocery store (literally never had employees’ backs), so they’ll probably just do an override on the price anyway.
They’ll price check it and find the new price. The customer will be blamed.
There are laws in many states governing many items clearly articulating that the price cannot change during business hours/within a business day.
Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.
Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.
That depends on who is in charge of the country at any given time. Three-letter entities have a way of being hamstrung during conservative administrations.
The next time conservatives have control, though, it will likely be permanent. The FTC would certainly be dismantled.
Just wait until they track your phone in the stores and tie it to demographics like where you live and profession to build a financial profile to estimate how much you are able to pay. As you walk down aisles, the prices change to your price to gouge out every possible penny from you.
The true cyberpunk dystopia. They ultimately want to keep you as close to destitute without actually being bankrupt as possible, that way they extract as much as possible from you at all times for as long as they can.
Capitalism will always try to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.
I can see this happening 100%. It’s already kind of a thing in home renovation and construction. Some businesses will charge you a higher hourly labor rate if your materials are expensive. Installing tile or whatever should be the same labor rate, but they assume customers buying expensive materials “must be rich” and won’t blink at paying more for labor, too. They don’t all do this, of course, but it’s something to watch out for (and one of many reasons you should always get multiple estimates from different contractors).
Expensive tile tends to be fragile, and its assumed the customer will expect more precise work, so not a great analogy
Both Apple and Android randomize MAC addresses now, so the easiest form of tracking is already dead.
I like the idea of cloing “low prices” identifiers, but you would need an inside man letting thr app know what those are, and at that point the Corpos could also get that info.
Im sure these systems try various other fingerprinting. The most likely is the apps they all push on you for discounts and curbside pickup now. They likely have location data/etc all turned on and tracking, along with your all your purchaing data to micro target you.
I’d expect “kill all radio signals” to be the most direct answer that they can’t hack around. The old ways are sometimes best.
If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.
If people are starving after a natural disaster, we can raise the price of everything because they’re desperate and have no alternatives.
Are we to judge simple supply and demand now? If they haven’t been smart enough to save for a disaster, then perhaps they deserve what they get. If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Bah. Humbug. A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every natural disaster.
/S
How is this not considered false advertising? You go to a shelf and see your favorite snack on sale, you grab it. Finish the rest of your selections and go to check out.
By the time you get there the price of your snack is no longer what was shown on the shelf.
If it isn’t false advertising, it’s bait and switch.
Well AI set the price just for you! It is custom based on how much money and how impulsive you are.
Works great to fix rents and wages… why not your avocado!?
Having just recently worked at a grocery store, they’re likely shooting for being able to change prices daily without having to pay 3 extra workers to change all the tags in the grocery store. So it likely wont change during the day, for the reasons you listed, but any chance they get to up the price without a percieved loss in customers, they’ll just hit a button and bam, jacked the price by a dollar
They’re not meant to be used to change prices on the fly. The 10 minute window is literally just so you can fix mistakes like typos, in case it says 179.9 when you meant to put 17.99. Like when a customer comes in, and says “the advertising said this is supposed to be $5 this weekend, but the price tag still says its $8, what gives?” Then you can go to the back, change the price to $5, and it will update all the tags for this item on the fly. There is no limitation stating you need to wait 24 hours or however long you think would be fair. You can also use it to schedule sales that start at a specific time of day, fx food items that are made to be consumed on the same day might get cheaper near closing time.
Price gouging is still price gouging, and generally, at least where im from, there is a legal obligation that the customer can rely on the listed price at the time they pick up the item. I can’t imagine it’s that much different in the us?
Source: l literally used to program the software that’s used for these things
Though I agree that it’s likely not how they were designed, but capitalists must do a capitalism.
When the fine for doing exactly this, is a small portion of the increased profits (and only after it’s discovered, and prosecuted), then it’s just another way to do said capitalism.
