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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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.
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.
They really will just fuck us to death if we let them.
One dose of capitalism please.
name checks out
It’s Walmart. They are one of the scummiest around. They nickel and dime everything and everyone.
Always has been. Do you know the story of Jacob and Esau and the cost of a lentil stew for a starving brother?
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.
The next town over from me, if you wash a white shirt in the washing machine it comes out with a tint of brown. We drink bottled 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.
oh, Europe, yeah that makes sense. see I live in bumfuck America where they’ll tell you to get fucked and then shoot your kid
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.
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.
Good. Annoy the managers until they get rid of this shit
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.
Managers like that suck. When I was a manager in retail whenever I made a choice that may have agreed with or disagreed with one of my Team’s opinions or choices I always stopped to explain my reasoning and sought to make sure they understood. Taught my whole team how to deal with shit without needing me present, though I also reminded them that the instant it became too much they were to call me up.
No one fucks with my crew. Though I also knew the best thing I could do for them was stand in front only when I needed to, not every time if they wanted to handle it.
I wish they’d all been more like you. Instead, all of the ones I had until my mid 20s were the kind of people who would tell us the policy was X and we absolutely could not do Y, and the second a customer bitched, suddenly Y was fine and they made us look like liars or idiots.
The pricing decisions will be made above the manager’s pay-grade.
They’ll price check it and find the new price. The customer will be blamed.
Sounds like a good idea to take photos of the price signs in that case.
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.
There are laws in many states
For now…
Shall we okay a game of “guess which shit hole states don’t have this”?
Then you pour it out at the checkout and walk out without paying.
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!
Sounds like a market to pay people to shop for you.
But don’t pay them too much.
Ideally, we should trust one large company to manage paying them as little as possible for us. Probably through an app, so they can slurp up data on us to decide how much we’d pay for the service
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
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!
Time to design a phone faraday cage for grocery shopping.
deleted by creator
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.
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
the hottest
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.
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!?
Except it’s illegal and has precident being illegal with rent
Except it happens everyday and has been for at least a decade.
Sure realpage is getting sued… Will i ever get any of that money back?
To ask is to answer ;)
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.
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
“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.
You know what the world needs? Surge pricing on water.
–No one, ever.
I’m sure Nestle has already thought of that.
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
And the said that it’s a good thing.
Capitalism is a disease.
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.
Price gouging is effectively legal in the US…
Not sure where you live but it happens everywhere and every time there is a good opportunity to make money.
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.
If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news
Except we know they would rather throw that shit out than sell it cheaper… maybe they will donate it.
I can’t speak for everywhere, but the Kroger here sells meat close to its expiration date for low prices. Of course, you often have to use it that night in order to be safe, but…
Or freeze it
Good point.
I was never a grocer, but I worked in the catering industry for almost 10 years (which, to be fair, is a very different industry that just happens to have some overlap). Standard procedure is to throw away practically everything that can’t be reused on another event. I talked to the higher-ups about this multiple times and they always gave me the same two answers: ‘We can’t be liable for someone getting sick from eating our old food’ and ‘We donate to Second Helpings once a year, so at least we try’
So you were told to get fucked?
Checks out lol
They would not let you take it home?
Officially, no. But when you’re the last truck to get back at 3am, nobody’s gonna stop me. Every once in a while they would look the other way, but it honestly depended on their mood more than anything else
i get the official position, IRS could deem it income with everything that comes with that
so arbitrary enforcement of policy, corpo world 101
I mean, I get it too, but I was also throwing away enough food to feed at least a dozen people (usually much more) every single day. To make it worse, I drove by at LEAST 2-4 unhoused persons on the way back to the shop (not even counting my drive back home)
My wedding had a food minimum.
We come from big Italian families, in multiple meanings of the word. There was still so much food. Hors d’oeuvres, cheese board, crudites, bread tray, 3 courses, dessert…and then 11 o clock hits and the last food comes out. Pizza. So much fucking pizza.
I’d never seen so much food waste in one place. I really hated that there was a food minimum. The venue itself was cheap, and nice, but I’m certainly not getting married there again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is probably a prelude to groceries getting Uber like surge pricing, and likely targeted pricing schemes too.
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 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.
Just gonna squeeze every last drop out of you. Every. Last. Drop.
Ope
