- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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If it’s hot outside we can raise the price of water…”
Holy fuck dude that’s some endgame capitalism right there.
They really will just fuck us to death if we let them.
name checks out
Yes. That is actually the point. MUST maximize that profit!
Airlines do this now, as does Uber.
The tech is only just catching up for retail. This is end game capitalism hope you enjoyed the ride.
Always has been. Do you know the story of Jacob and Esau and the cost of a lentil stew for a starving brother?
It’s the rollercoaster tycoon umbrella strat all over again
Water is free/cheap though. They have a water fountain. You have plumbing into your living space with a virtually limitless supply.
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
Tile was just an example. Applies to paint and everything else. I will use the contractor who doesn’t do this upcharging nonsense. If you want to pay more for no reason, you do you!
This is just a great opportunity for a poor person to rent their phone out, you gotta look for the silver lining in the capitalism!
This as exactly my thought. It’s not crazy to imagine this when I know for a fact systems exist in supermarkets to calculate optimal prices in different stores, based on the size of the store, the demographics of the area it’s in etc
Time to design a phone faraday cage for grocery shopping.
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I’ve got two phones, one for the walmart and one for the hoes.
Goddammit, will the hoes be using similarly advanced pricing technology?!
Et tu, Cinnamon? Et tu?
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.
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.
It’s worse than that, if they have shelf scanners they could see cans of peas just went from 4 to 3 so they then increase price because of the demand you yourself just created.
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.
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
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“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”
Dude actually said that out loud. Wild. Teach me how to give that little of a fuck.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to charge people more when they’re willing to pay more because they’re literally dying of thirst.
Or some such bullshit.
I just gotta say tho, Fuck Phil; no cap.
Did I use it right?
Yes you did, I’m proud of you
So dumb. Could have said just ice cream and the message would carry better
Ooooo. Can’t wait till a hurricane is coming and they raise the price of water and canned food.
I wonder how much price gouging will be permitted. If they can raise the price of water when it’s hot then could they raise it “just enough” to not get in trouble with the state when a hurricane is coming
Price gouging is effectively legal in red states. Conservatives do not prosecute businesses for harming people for profit.
On the shelves, surge pricing.
Weekend evenings, pizza and beer prices skyrocket. Rest of the week evenings, staples are higher like beef, chicken, etc. Holidays, Turkey prices go up the closer to thanksgiving you get. Plastic cups, paper plates, grilling necessities go up approaching the 4th of July.
“Oh, but it’s just shortages…”
Price gouging by any other name if still illegal. A heatwave, especially in this escalating climate crisis, is no different than a hurricane or other natural disaster and many places already have laws to deal with the ethics of raising prices under those circumstances.
“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.
One half of that is good news for one party and bad news for the other and the other half is the opposite.
I think this person needs a psychological evaluation.
Potentially every 10 seconds. So you put the item in your cart at one price, and then discover it’s a different price at checkout.
I hope shoppers start dumping a bunch of these back on the store, and they are forced to restock them. Would serve them right. It’s the only thing that will impact it it: make it an expensive hassle for them.
Refrigerated or frozen items can’t be restocked, there’s no real way to tell how long they’ve been out of refridgeration. Hit em in the pocket books.
Note that those 10 seconds are really just the theoretical capability of the digital price tags. The same way you could replace the paper version once per second. Otherwise yes, shitty.
some minimum-wage retail worker shouldn’t be punished for the decisions of corporate. they have zero control over this, and their complaints will just be ignored by corporate anyway.
I considered that, but the worker gets paid the same either way. Most of them really don’t care. Restocking is no worse than ringing up a bunch of people and bagging.
And I disagree that corporate won’t notice. They track everything in detail. The POS system will record refused items.
as a retail employee myself, i assure you that standing still and pushing buttons would be preferable to all of the added work that comes with restocking something.
and i said corporate would ignore their complaints, not that they wouldn’t notice them.
They won’t ignore the metrics. They obsess over them, so the larger point stands. My brother consults with Wal Mart and Kroger, I know what I’m talking about.
I have worked multiple minimum wage jobs. I have friends who worked in grocery stores. I’m not talking from no experience.
You’re really stretching to win an internet argument here, when we’re basically on the same side (I assume)…which is price gouging customers is bad.
corporate pays attention to one metric: profit line go up or go down. walmart is famous for not giving a damn about their employees.
You’re really stretching to win an internet argument here
lol, no. i’m here to have a nice discussion. i’m not having an argument, certainly not one i feel needs “winning”. if you’re going to get hostile over nothing, then i’m done here.
On one hand, this cuts down on paper/sticker waste and time spent making and printing new prices and such.
On the other, I don’t like that they could just change the price whenever they feel like. Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.
Paper waste is really something that was overstated in the early 2000s. Yes paper is made from trees. But trees are renewable compared to the silicon and carbon consumed in these electronic tags. It’s way more environmentally friendly to use paper.
That would be my only concern. Like picking something up and have the price increase on my way to the register.
Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.
Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Walmart doesn’t want to be open 24 hours a day…
I mean, even if they went back to 24 hours, I’m sure it would still be able to change at a certain time, like midnight or something.
But I get what you’re saying.
I find it hard to believe that the environmental impact of having a paper tag per shelf which gets replaced maybe once a week is worse than the impact of manufacturing, installing and powering one digital screen per shelf.
This is probably a prelude to groceries getting Uber like surge pricing, and likely targeted pricing schemes too.
This is gonna suck for restockers when a lot of items get left at the cashier’s because Walmarts ghouls decided to raise the price between shelf and checkout.
- Buy groceries when the price is low.
- Refund when the prices go up.
- Profit!
Receipts have a time stamp, so they’d have a record of the actual price you paid. If you paid in cash and didn’t get a receipt, and if they make an exception for your return, they’d base it on when you said you bought it. You might be able to get one or two exceptions depending on who’s working. With that said you’d better make a purchase of thousands of dollars and pay in cash to make sure to get at least a few dollars back for your efforts.
While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.
“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”
Rather than seeing an opportunity to use surge pricing, Gallino says retailers are likely drawn to electronic shelf tags to ensure consistency between online and in-store pricing.
This person must live on another planet.
Sure, the prices won’t be changing every six seconds, but anyone with half a mind can see these tags won’t be used only when stock or expiry are a factor. The prices will be up on the weekend to start. Then later it’ll be changing through the day to get higher prices between 4:00-7:00 when people are getting off work.
The arguments of no longer needing people to do yet another menial task and increasing utility of labels for consumers both have merit, but this alien even says the primary factor:
“The bottom line … is the calculation of the amount of labor that they’re going to save by incorporating this."
Don’t worry, they will also be making it so you have to use their data mining apps that require unconscionable permissions just to see that they are changing prices every 10 seconds.
