- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
I’m sure there’ll be:
- a lawsuit
- local news coverage
- a statement from some high up congressperson
- a statement from the president “come on!”
- a lengthy and expensive congressional investigation with the heads of the big three food stores where they’ll ask them if they know how facebook works
- a convoluted bill passed that is based on the rolling average price creep over x consecutive hours that’s so confusing everyone just gives up and pays the surge price or starves as America tries as hard as possible to third-world our ass until Putin’s Russia (or North Korea or whatever) looks like the Promised Land by comparison (Reverse Babylon AD?)
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.
Whole Foods and Best Buy have done this for years. It allows centralized control of sale pricing without having to print and post new signage at every location.
Aldi has been doing it forever. But it doesn’t change based on surge pricing. What an evil idea…
Aldi has been doing it forever
That’s because most supermarkets in Europe have had these systems for about 15 years. As usual, the yanks are a decade behind and find a way to use it for greed :(
IMO the tech itself is fine, but using it to gouge people based on weather and such is not.
So Walmart can easily raise the price while an item is in your shopping cart? Pick up a $6 bag of Cheetos and pay $8 at the self serve checkout.
Alright, so I quite literally haven’t stepped foot into Walmart since June of 2015. The only money I’ve given them since was for two grocery pick-ups during early COVID when it was in a 5% cashback category on my CC. I have no idea of what changes have been made in the physical stores since then, and this sounds … Horrifying. What happens if the price changes before you check out? I would feel duped. Are they going to make you “check in” when you enter so they can give you the price at time of entry? Or are you SOL if you don’t make it to the cash register in time? And wouldn’t that extra rush to get out make them lose money on stuff you pick up wandering around? Or maybe they want you in and out as fast as possible. What a clusterfuck.
I do love telling people about my Walmart-less living when it suits the conversation, and 90% of the time they are shocked, absolutely flabbergasted. “How can you do that?! Where do you get all of your stuff?!?” Well, like many middling American cities home to at least 20,000 people, there is a Target, Walgreens, a regional grocery store, Maurices, and for some reason like 12 auto parts stores right down the street. I can’t recall anything in Walmart, aside from exclusive clothing brands (if you can call them that), that I haven’t found elsewhere in at least some quantity-per-package. I get that people want a one-and-done shopping experience, but besides my routine Aldi stops, I don’t shop that much anymore, even online.
My reasons? I would like to say that I am boycotting them for paying shit wages, being viciously anti-union, and all the other ethical shortcomings that never seem to improve. And that definitely is a part of it. But the main reason, the one setting me on my path toward Walmart Recovery (I should start up a Wal-Anon) was from the experience I had the night I needed to buy a broom, my last night or day in that store.
It was somewhere between 11 and 1 am (definitely after 11) and I had just moved house into a… House. (I was in an apartment previously.) The place needed a serious cleaning, and I simply did not have the correct broom for the job. Picked out the broom and a few other cleaning things, all was well. But shortly before checking out, a group of rowdy youngsters in their late teens sidled by me, laughing about something while also eyeballing my cart with the broom and other boring household accoutrements. I was but 23. I guess I hadn’t shaken the adolescent anxiety of feeling judged about appearances and actions at that point, but the thought that these slightly younger peers were making fun of my broom shopping was too much to bear.
“Oh my gawd, who buys a broom on a Friday night?? Get a life, ya loser.”
“I did. I did get a life! I’m moving on up, bitches! I went from a 500 sqft apartment to an 800 sqft house with fuckin windows on all sides! I can put plants in every room, every nook and tiny-ass cranny! And I can bring my cat! And if that damn house of mine needs a broom at midnight, then my gods, I am going to go out and fucking GET ONE.”
Anyway, that’s my story about how I broke up with Walmart. DM me for requests to join Wal-Anon, we have plenty of seats for everybody! (The room will be free of any and all Mainstays furnishings and the coffee will be served sans Great Value cups, I assure you.)
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
deleted by creator
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.
I never imagined there’s be a fucking Happy Hour at goddamn Wal-Mart.
Never been in a supermarket when they put the reduced price stickers out?
Turns all our local pensioners from Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
Time to design a phone faraday cage for grocery shopping.
It might be possible to make an open-source app that causes your phone to spit out a different ID that is optimized for the lowest prices, triggering an adblocker-style arms race.
I’ve got two phones, one for the walmart and one for the hoes.
deleted by creator
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.
So this is being sold a certain way, as a tech advancement that takes advantage of “surge” pricing, as if retailers are adopting the latest tech and profitability schemes. And in fact, wrt a huge company like Walmart that operates on wafer-thin margins scaled up to mass consumption quantities, I don’t doubt this will have some effect.
But the fact is, these chains already had extremely dynamic pricing schemes, and would change many prices daily or at least weekly; its just they had employees walking around who manually scanned the items and replaced the labels. When I worked at a box retailer we had 3-5 people where this was their only job. And i didnt work at a place with half as many skus as walmart. So the real savings is in the value of the labor the company will cut from implementing these smart shelf labels.
The initial investment will seem quite high, but businesses split up their capital investments over 10-30 years. So despite the hype, and even the predatory valance on the philosophy of the tech itself, in fact this technology, just like most technical advancement, is to automate the tasks of workers and eliminate their jobs. Profit is made from stealing from workers.
a huge company like Walmart that operates on wafer-thin margins
Walmart has historically run enormously wide margins, thanks to their “import shoddy crap from overseas” business strategy.
They’re vertically integrated so I doubt the stores themselves are making all of that profit. But you’re right, they’re very profitable as a company I was only thinking about the stores. especially since they handle every transaction from the moment its hits our shores to the moment it leaves the stores, accumulating little markups along the way as it’s passed from legally separate business to business, the warehouses are a different company from the trucking and logistics, as well as the stores; all owned by the parent co. But the store’s profits probably aren’t much higher percentage than any other box retailer or grocery store.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
This is probably a prelude to groceries getting Uber like surge pricing, and likely targeted pricing schemes too.
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?
Then you pour it out at the checkout and walk out without paying.
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.
There are laws in many states
For now…
deleted by creator
Shall we okay a game of “guess which shit hole states don’t have this”?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
