Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket
3d 5h ago by lemmus.org/u/Beep in technology from www.abc.net.au
It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:
Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:
- sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
- stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.
What law? In what country?
Australia, the country the article is talking about. That was a quote from the ACCC website.
The closest thing I can think of would be Quebec, they have some fairly strong consumer protections, but i don't know how far they would extend in cases like this
stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected
Not a lawyer but couldn't they just refuse to sell it to you? We all know it would be bullshit but couldn't a company say "Oh that minimum wage clerk made a mistake, but don't blame them, just an honest mistake."
Or is the law, if it's on the shelf, it must be honored?
They would have to refuse to sell to anyone. It would likely not be lawful to leave it on the shelf and sell it at the higher price to someone else who might not have noticed the discrepancy, until they fix up the shelf pricing.
I will institute my own "dynamic pricing" scheme if this ever happens
Is it really dynamic if the price is always "free"?
surely negative numbers are in the cards? since we deserve the compensation for all the trouble
Wait for all the codeberg projects tryna break these things
Finally, a practical reason to have a flipper zero or similar.
Haha, that's a perfect application for an otherwise almost useless (but incredible) device
If the price changes for them specifically, yes. That's the entire concept they're pushing here.
Its much easier than you'd think.
I don't know what you're talking about, I'm obviously not gonna steal anything. Sure, accidents happen from time to time. The supermarket decided to replace their cashiers with self checkout operated by random non-employees, after all. If I happen to ring up filet mignon as a Roma tomato, I think that's just the inevitable result of outsourcing your labor to untrained civilians with no incentive to accurately do the job .
This reminds me of Bill Burr's bit on the subject… "Twenty years, I thought I was a standup comedian. Now apparently I'm moonlighting as a fucking bag boy."
Self checkout is only a valid option if you are stealing. No, I'm not going to do your job to increase your profits by having less employees. Fuck those things.
remember if you see someone shoplifting food no the fuck you didnt
Especially if you work there.
honestly the best part about working at a supermarket was delivery day when i could weave through the maze of pallets and sleep on the paper towels behind everything like a fort. i sure as fuck aren't going to report anyone shoplifting food.
Thank you for your service in working minimum effort at a giant corpo
Dynamic pricing Price gouging. FTFY.
If my local store switches to digital price tags to do this I'm just going to gather as many as I can and flush them down the toilet.
It's a nice thought but good luck not getting caught on the 3k cameras in the store and following you to your car.
It would be a shame if your phone was infected by a malware that rewrites all the prices in the tags in your vicinity.
Why is everything suddenly $800.85? :-P
These tags are e-ink, so there could be monochrome pictures!
Haha, ASCII schlongs begone! Now there are pictures.
Of course I wouldn't be doing it without some preparation.
Security cameras in stores are kept purposely garbage so they don't get bugged by the police to provide footage to them. Unless something changed in the last decade since I worked in a retail joint.
It has definitely changed a lot
I can tell you from personal experience that there exists a very happy corporate servant who is happy to give footage to police. The security cameras in some stores are shit because the owner is cheap (this is the case with most gas stations).
Why would they care?
My local Woolies has had e-ink tags for at least two years, maybe more. Between this and Coles hiring Palantir, we mostly shop at Aldi. Bunnings and Kmart using facial recognition as if it's no biggie as well. How long until they partner with CBA to check your credit card limit as you stand in front of the bananas to see how much you'll pay?
They're opening an Aldi's near me. I'm excited.
Aldi's is the shit. No bloat, no bs, just groceries. They don't have some stuff, but for the staples you're set. I usually go to the more traditional grocery store every 4th trip or so.
Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.
Dynamic sounds way more fun!
I’m still not clear on exactly what triggers this. Is it phone location, because a phone number is linked to all your data (unless you’ve been gaming it for the last 5-10yrs)? Do I walk by with my phone and the price goes up?
Is it like goodwill? Does the price change as you’re checking out? Do I grab a 2lb bag of medium roast coffee beans for $13, and because buying it consistently for decades, it’s now $18 at checkout? But is still $13 for the guy behind me who decided to try whole bean over pre-ground?
If rich people turn off their phones before hitting the parking lot and poor people leave theirs on, does the entire store get cheaper?
If you take a pic with your phone of the “advertised” price does that mitigate sudden increases while checking out, if you’re even watching?
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
What are the triggers?
We've had them for quite some time. They don't change price for individual customers, I don't think they change the price in the middle of the day either. But, I guess, they can change the prices just before opening, like if the wether service forecasts a rainy day they could rise the price of umbrellas and raincoats. Cold? Hot chocolate and soups. Hot? Ice cream and cold drinks. Certain asshole died overnight? Champaign and confetti cannons through the roof. And so on...
Oh, you mean price gouging
Oh, no no no. It's called "capitalism". Supply and demand pricing at it's finest! /s
They don't currently, but they could.
Take brand x on the shelf. Sold for $5 at a profit of $1. They sell 10 per week. You buy 2 if those every week, on Wednesday at about 6pm. Why not make them $5.50 next Wednesday and see what happens. Normal price on other days as no pattern identified.
Then once that's successful, why not have beacons detecting your phone, or even the stores app feeding your location. Then they can update just for the hours you are there.
Oh, but you'll say you swore it said $5 when you picked it off the shelf. The worker will say they have to charge what's there now and what it scanned as. Your choice to purchase it or go look for something else.
They've already started all this crap with online purchasing. It's just moving it to retail.
The industry calls this “clientelling”
Surge pricing really only works when you put the customer in isolation. Uber can do it because you're the only one seeing the rate for the trip you want to take. Amazon can do it because you're shopping while taking a shit at work. Nobody else sees the prices in your online shopping cart, that's not the case in retail.
The profit motive behind these tags is wage savings. It saves in the time it takes to change out price tags when the prices do change. It saves in the time used in finding and replacing missing or damaged tags. It saves in the amount of manual price corrections at the till when the tag doesn't match the till because the tag wasn't updated - or the lost time and revenue if someone abandons their cart because of said disagreement.
Could they do what you're saying? Technologically speaking, it's been possible for several years - we've had these tags on most major store shelves in Canada for a very long time now and apps tracking our every move. Why hasn't it happened already? These stores have had everything they need to implement this scheme, and of all the shady cunts in this world, Galen Weston would have by now if it could have turned a profit.
It's easier to just price-fix the bread and pay a fraction of your profit in lawsuit settlements decades later than to do what you're describing.
I a shop with 10 products, yes, I'd agree. In a supermarket with thousands of products, they can predict what you're likely to buy if you're a regular customer and you might be the only one buying those items that day.
I don't expect them to do it overnight. First they roll them out for the cost savings. Just like they did with barcodes rather than price labels. Then they start to look at other savings or profit centres.
After a while it becomes, why wouldn't they do it?
Why go through the trouble of gaslighting someone with digital price tags somehow changing the price on the fly based on whoever happens to be looking at it (BTW, what happens if two people with different price profiles are looking at the tag at the same time?), when they could just remove the tags entirely or even more likely, just close the store and force you to shop online where they can do all the usual online price fuckery?
Some countries require pricing to be visible. I would assume, just like online, they will use algorithms and ai to figure out what price point gives the most profit. Its only trouble to set up. The corporate world doesn't look at trouble. They look at cost. If the return investment is positive, they do it. If it's high, they do it as a priority.
Not all retail is online. Much is but not all. Groceries is one that is often better in person for that evenings meal on the way home from work. It's led to the rise of metro style supermarkets near transport hubs.
Grocery is already going online, look at all the companies sponsoring youtube vids. The margins for what you're describing are, at the absolute best, razor-thin.
E-tags draw significantly more profit from things like one-day (loss leader) flash sales, or in-store specials, or other conventional retail pricing tactics.
Take a 4-hour sale on some popular product, put an ad up on Instagram to get people in your store on the way home from work and you make a mint. You don't need E-tags to do that, but it means that you don't have to pay someone to change out the paper tags on that product twice in their shift.
You're getting distracted by the least likely way they'll fuck you over, when they're just sticking to tried-and-true collusion.
The margins in grocery are razor thin. It's a volume game..usually they have your cash before they need to pay the supplier with 30 days payment pretty standard in business.
I'm not saying they won't do all you're suggesting. I'm saying they'll do both. Unless we prevent them with regulations and fines.
surge pricing is what you are referring to which is pretty much the main form of dynamic pricing.
That's the personalized prices. That's step two.
This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.
OP was making a lot of shit up.
I can imagine price stickers would update daily, and individual users would get personalized discounts on their app.
App-less buyers would pay the baseline price in the sticker, app users would pay less. Like existing loyalty card programs, but with more data collection
It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.
So, Sunday afternoon being the worst time to grocery shop will Leo be the most expensive time to shop.
Versus 9am on a Wednesday.
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
Au contraire
In other news, shoplifting is inexplicably on the rise in shops featuring dynamic pricing.....
We can't compete against these internet stores. People just don't respect brick and mortar and buying locally anymore /s
Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/
Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.
The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”
You wouldn't shoot a man over a bagel, would you?
Corporate America:
slavery is legal in jails (in the US)
Boycott the stores that use them, it might help them change their mind behind they become the norm.
This is Australia and I think 90% of grocery shops are either this one or the competitor
I knew it was Australia, didn't realise that there was such a monopoly. Still possible, just makes it harder. Are there stores that aren't part of any chain? They're dying out here, usually the owners have signed up to a franchise.
It's unlikely to happen anyway, but there should be a way that we can universally stop greed.
Should be against the law to change the price after the shop opens at something like a grocery store. Nobody should be able to shop anywhere where the price you pick it up at can change by the time you get to the checkout.
Edit: Maybe there could be some exception for mid day price changes if you emptied the entire store of customers first, but enforcing something like that seems difficult.
Issue is that haggling is actually legal in many countries.
So at the cashier they will make you an offer, which, if you pay, accept.
Now with technical support making individual offers becomes pretty easy and effordless on their end, but if you are in a hurry you don't have that technical support to make a counter offer that effordless... So the shopper is at an disadvantage. Either way, your reaction, wherever you buy or not will train the AI of the store to extract the maximum amount of money of the broad customer base. If some people are priced out of living, they probably don't care.
Haggling might be fine but they have to honor price tags.
If I'm in a grocery store and I see $1.00 they can't change it and try to charge me $1.10, and when I object and say it was $1.00 it shows $1.10 now.
This is why american taxes had me confused when over there.. it says $1.00 on the pricetag, so how can they tell me a different price at the register??
The price of the item hasn't changed, it's just that they didn't include tax in the price. Yes, it's stupid.
Well... In Germany apparently they can.
The price tag is not binding, it is a mere price suggestion. The final price is the one when you actually buy it at the checkout.
They do that anyway, but usually prices going down.
e.g. yellow stickers going on things that will expire soon.
You've not lived if you haven't watched two pensioners fight to the death over a 20p pack of Greek yoghurt.
That's a little different.
Items that can expire get marked down at some point during the day, but they aren't changing the normal price of the item. If there's 20 packs of chicken breasts on the shelf, 5 or 6 might get the sticker.
There's no guarantee that the one you have would have even gotten a sticker, and if you're savvy enough, you might have intentionally chosen the pack with the earliest most recent packed on date, or gone late enough to be after the mark down time near the end of the day (at least where I am)
They aren't just going up and marking down the main price on everything, and its also always down, never up.
It is morally correct to shoplift from stores that do this.
It might not be legal, but it's already morally acceptable to shoplift from Coles and Woolworths
I just don't because it would be a massive pain if I were to be caught
Then I won't be going to that supermarket.
Time to vote with our wallets. I absolutely will refuse to shop at any store in my area that starts implementing this.
Sure... If you even notice it. And if enough people will care and if there are still stores around that don't do that, clearly superior profit maximising scheme.
I'd rather want this stuff to become illegal. So calling your representatives, make news and go to the streets about this would I think help more that yet another boycott.
I completely agree. Best case scenario I hope this becomes illegal, however if not then I still would never shop somewhere with this sort of scummy tactic.
if there are still stores around that don’t do that
That would be my concern is that we end up with an illusion of choice.
Or be like me where we have two Coles over the road from each other and a woolworths 5 minutes down the road and that's about it beyond corner stores that are only there surviving off the sale of alcohol to itinerants who get refused service at big name bottlos
and then there will be a really popular AI driven phone app that you will use to scan items and find out if you're being ripped off or not
I already have a browser plugin that tells me the price history of everything at Coles. There's one for Woolies too.
Good choice of product to care about.
I actually saw Tim Tams on the shelf at a Morrison's in Northern Scotland, and it was cheaper than Coles in Australia. It's absurdly priced here.
I found an industrial sized box of them, and snapped them up. I've been doling them out to some poor ozzies stuck in my neck of the woods for months now. I think the end price was about two dollars a box.
Do you have an App that offers better places to shop?
$6 dollarydoos for fucking timtams?!
Even at $3.60, the supermarkets are pissing on you and telling you it's raining.
Those are some huge price swings for some chocolate in just a couple months time span. Is it common for products to fluctuate so much in price in your area?
Yes. It's like this for close to half the product range at both Coles and Woolworths.
"50% off" I consider to be the normal price. Every price is either doubled or not. There are no "specials".
What's the name of that plugin?
Coles Trend.
You might need to upgrade your browser 😉
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/coles-trend/
Sigh, no you don't need a fucking AI app to do that.
And you ARE being ripped off if you are dealing with a corporation, whether it's the price, the quality, the quantity, the fine text, ect. You are getting fucked every single time.
So please don't be holding up the line and blocking aisles while your chatbot nanny tells tells you that everything in FUCK-YOU-LOL-MART™ is overpriced. Learn how underscan and shotplift like a normal person.
Sigh, no you don't need a fucking AI app to do that.
AI could just be used as a buzzword, so that the movement becomes more popular
Not quite the same thing, but I used an LLM to cobble together a HTML file that allows me to search for products on Coles, Woolies, Aldi and Amazon at the same time in the same window (via frames and a Firefox extension to get around some security settings).
Works a treat when planning our big shops for the week, and has already saved us hundreds of dollars since Jan.
I'm going to start dynamic payments. "Oh, between 6-9pm I pay 10% less."
These have got to be hackable in a fun way
Firmware on these is pretty tight. They're usually using CC2510s or CC2530s. The CC2510 has a voltage glitch hack that you can use to attempt to read the contents via the DCOUPL capcitor, but it's not very effective and you can only read a few bytes per attack.
You can see a github some tools some have created here. Eventually someone is going to read the firmware off theses and be able to hack them, it's just a matter of time.
I'd assume the firmware is the same shipped with the vendor or pretty much very close to the sample code.
Does it require something like an API key or password? Can these implement diff Hellman key exchange? Otherwise I'd just assume you can eavesdrop when someone is updating the contents.
If they got batteries
I want them batteries
Thanks. I hate it.
I've already sent feedback to Walmart about my refusal to buy anything with a digital price tag. The thing is, I believe them when they say that prices are only updated between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. The problem is that that policy could change literally any time.
Walmart has every inch of their store covered in cameras. They have facial recognition systems so they know who I am the moment I walk in the store. They know I buy graham crackers. They know I've put up with price increases in the past. What is preventing them from adding $0.10 to those graham crackers' price tag the moment I walk down the crackers aisle? Literally nothing. They could, and that's reason enough for me to boycott
Personally I have been boycotting Walmart for over 15 years because they refuse to hire most of their employees full time so as to dodge having to provide mandated health insurance and they have a long history of completely screwing the lives of people who use their automated check out system.
Couldn't pay me to shop at their horrible stores. FUCK Walmart and FUCK the Walton family who've become billionaires off the back of poor people in America.
Yeah, my problem is that I'm too poor to shop elsewhere. So far my local Kroger is only a little more expensive, but at least I know that everyone is paying $8.49 for that six pack of graham crackers
Unfortunately that is by design. Walmart actively works to close down local stores and corners the market on wholesalers to control the price so they are the lowest price in any area. Only ones that can usually stand up to them or places like Aldi.
The fact that the other guy who buys the same crackers, but they know they have to give a $0.10 discount so that he'll buy a beer with it, is also walking down the same aisle. That is likely what would prevent them.
A problem area is pricing that changes 10 minutes after you put it in basket but before checkout. Though OP did go through some other abuse scenarios, though some were far fetched. This can't allow a store to personalize prices the way a web site can.
This is what I came to the comments to gripe about this whole thing. Yes, they can play some games and probably will, but consider: People will be watching. They do this and you bet people will track this crap and post about it. The blowback will be huge.
If they're stupid enough to try this, it will not last. lol. You can raise prices over the long term, but fuck around with short term prices people can see changing for no good reason? Yeah.....
And on the "personal pricing" - that's written by someone that doesn't understand how barcodes work.
But I'm sure they will try to play some games with it.
The solution of which is that you change the tag before you change the actual price if it's an increase, and the price before the tag if it's a discount, with a long enough delay. That's what they do with gas pumps and the advertisements here in Finland.
Portland banned it for housing. Time to ban it for everything else!
https://katu.com/news/local/portland-city-council-votes-to-ban-ai-assisted-rent-price-fixing-to-promote-fair-housing-oregon-artificial-intelligence-landlord-housing-crisis
If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we'll just have to start dynamic shopping.
It's weird, the higher the prices get, the worse my memory and aptitude with self service checkouts gets.
Don't you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?
Start pushing your state gov to ban this.
Free epaper displays!
They already do that, just not as frequently. They change price tags of items every day by hand
Right? This isn't a question of if, more like how often
And if they do it on an individual basis.
Like do they detect that a shopper is in a hurry, or if they just need one more ingredient for their cake so they are willing to pay more.
these gonna get hacked...
Hacking a pricetag would do fk all, just leads to more people scanning it and getting a shock at the higher actual price.
Someone could hack it to make all the prices $1000, no one would know the prices and then ultimately probably not buy anything.
I will buy that for a dollar. (no really lettuce for a $1 is worth the hack)
The chain grocery store near us (Safeway) has had stupidly high prices since the pandemic. I decided I’m not going to shop there anymore unless I really have to. We are lucky to have a locally-owned, small chain grocery store very close to us. Prices are high but honestly not much if at all higher than Safeway and I’d rather pay a small premium to help them stay in business. Also I doubt they would ever opt into something like this stupid price scheme, but Safeway absolutely would and will.
Yeah, Safeway has been shitty for a long time. I'm fortunate like you that we have a wealth of independent grocers and small ethnic markets that are so much better. They're also a fair bit cheaper too.
It is a subsidiary of Albertsons after being acquired by private equity investors led by Cerberus Capital Management in January 2015.
Classic
That explains a lot. Private equity kills everything it touches.
Agreed, but Safeway was shitty before 2015.
PE acquisition seems more like kindred spirits finding each other than something bad happening to Safeway.
of course it was.
i just went to safeway like last year, in like 10 years. and was surprised expensive things were, compared to even walgreens, WF and trader joes. even WG have some useful things at a sale sometimes, and some of thier generic products of hygeine products are cheaper than elsewhere. WF has sales all the time cheaper if you have prime(yea i know some people dont like prime for one reason).
I’ve heard that too; I’m not a WF shopper myself but a lot of other parents at my kids’ school are and that’s what they’ve told me. Bonkers.
it might not match grocery outlet(what ive seen its only slightly cheaper than big box stores(lik 10-25%) or COstco, but its quite close. plus ready to eat foods they made often can be 50% off if its close to sell by date.
Dynamic mass theft.
Innovative exploitation.
Next-Generation sculduggery.
In Poland it's already there in stores owned by the German Schwarz-Gruppe - Lidl and Kaufland. One might want to start shopping local to get exposed to 100% free range organic greed instead of lab-optimized greed at big stores.
That’s a shame because Lidl is the only affordable grocery store to begin with around here.
In Germany the price is actually set at the cashier, not the tag. I found that out the hard way once, where the price tag was wrong and I had to pay more.
So dynamic pricing wouldn't even require deploying these smart tags, the cashier or the 'smart' self-checkout could just do it on their own. They could just use their cameras, analyze your face to figure out if you are in a hurry or not, or in any other way willing to accept a higher price and then offer you the ware to something you are probably going to accept.
The future is realtime individualized price gouging.
It's illegal in Germany, but not in the way you think.
It's illegal to write to wrong price on the sign on purpose, but if it happens by accident the shop is not obligated to sell at the price on the sign.
That's it. You is blowing this way out of proportion.
Kurzum: Erst wenn Sie mit der Ware an die Kasse gehen und eine eindeutige Kaufabsicht mit Preisvorstellung abgeben, entscheidet sich, ob Sie den Artikel auch wirklich zu diesem Preis erhalten. Sie haben kein Recht, den angegebenen Preis einzufordern.
In short: Only when you take the goods to the checkout and express a clear intention to purchase at the asking price will it be decided whether you will actually receive the item at that price. You have no right to demand the stated price.
https://www.focus.de/immobilien/wohnen/falsche-preisauszeichnung-muessen-sie-trotzdem-den-richtigen-preis-zahlen_a0f9868d-30c0-45f0-b25e-27893a11b914.html
To me, that the price label is accidental wrong doesn't really matter.
Yes, like I said.
They are not obligated to give it to you at the "wrong" price, but at the same time it's illegal to put up the sign if it's misleading with the wrong price on purpose.
They are then obligated to fix the sign, otherwise it's misleading.
In Australia if the price at the checkout is higher than the price tag you are entitled to the first item free and subsequent items at the tag price.
So this dynamic pricing bullshit is even more bullshit.
In Australia if the price at the checkout is higher than the price tag you are entitled to the first item free
Got a source on that? That's not what the ACCC says.
My experience is they give it to you for ticket price and then immediately go and take away the incorrect ticket before someone else does the same. (Otherwise this would be false advertising and ACCC will fine them)
Yes, they have two options. Either honour the sticker price, or stop selling it at all until the price is fixed.
How is that not illegal in Germany? This has to fall under some anti-discrimination law
Haggling is legal in Germany. The cashier is making the offer.
Wherever it is discrimination or not would probably depend on the metrics used to decide the price.
If someone is really desperate for an article, then I could imagine that the cashier can raise the price.
But I am not a lawer. This is just my assumptions on how it could be implemented.
Haggling makes sense for transactions revolving around used cars, bulk goods and the like. A grocery store is a completely different setting. Everyone expects that they're getting the same deal for a given location. Kind of feels too close to what is legally considered fraud to be feasible.
I'm not sure there is a difference between those things in the German law.
As I said, in Germany the price tag is a mere price suggestion, the final offer and transaction happens on checkout.
In my case it was an electronic article, where the price tag showed a much lower price and the cashier then demanded much more. But it turned out that they can do that.
It's illegal, but not in the way you think.
It's illegal to write to wrong price on the sign on purpose, but if it happens by accident the shop is not obligated to sell at the price on the sign.
That's it. OP is blowing this way out of proportion.
Ghettotax for individuals everywhere incoming...
I'm going to start haggling with the cashiers.
Back when I worked on a till, there was no option to haggle. But, I didn't give a fuck if you robbed off with half the store. So maybe do that instead 👌
"GIVE ME BACK MY SON AND A DISCOUNT ON PAPAYA FRUITS!" Sir, this is a 7-11 (both of those are on markup now because you asked).
You can absolutely do this. My father regularly gets discounts on big ticket items like TVs. Most of the time he just asks and they take 5-10% off.
Please make it stop
Looks like e-ink. A thumb tack taped to your thumb should take care of these pretty quick and inconspicuously. Especially if people generally agree this is stupid and should be shunned.
… you know they have cameras?
Do you have 0 slight of hand? Just buff your agility, youll be okay.
Buff your morality
These corporations are subsidized by our tax dollars and every cent of their profit is stolen wages. Costing them money is the moral thing to do.
I know adventurers eat jerky, but thats a boot in your mouth. Buff your wisdom
High traffic area, common product that sees a lot of people. You could get 2-3 in a trip without much worry. Do it every few visits. Get a few additional people to do it with the same plan. If you notice more security, just move on, force them to give up or water a bunch of money. Leave reviews of the store how you don't like the extra security/cameras. Your a customer not a criminal! Call out the management...
You don't have to win in a day, but an expensive, annoying, psychological warfare approach... That and going after them on social media.
Risk criminal charges to cause $24 in damages, that will surely crumple the multi bilion dolar corporation.
Right, quick, alert all the pirates downloading software! Alert all the people doing password sharing on streaming services! ...
These companies don't get rich by wasting money. If they're seeing the change is costing them sales and potential sales, they revert. Fuck, Cracker Barrel last year tried to change its logo. Here are a few other examples https://time.com/3735718/consumer-pressure-business/. Hell, the biggest example of all, when New Coke was introduced and walked back 79 days later.
Replacing broken displays will cost them less than paying someone to swap labels by hand, and if it does become even mildly annoying to them you will be caught and have the book thrown at you. If you are gonna break the law you might as well do something more productive than generating tax write offs.
Yes, let's just vandalize the store instead of choosing to shop at another store
There isn’t really a choice in Aus. Take a look at how many supermarkets there are in Tassie and who owns them.
Good idea :D
Yeah, that's the way. Vandalize and shop at another store!!
If this happens, I will absolutely try to figure out how to game it
Bring items to self checkout. Scans as fast as possible. Walks out with a 20% dynamic discount.
Great, I have a very bad feeling about this, given the possible crisis of 2026.
It’s obviously shitty and exploitive anywhere, but this makes food desserts even more of an issue.
Scummy ass companies making life worse for everyone to line their pockets.
They wouldn’t even be in financial trouble, they would just be less rich.
I typically like my food desserts, compared to my just desserts. What is your issue with food desserts? Key lime pies not for you? Tres leches cakes send you into a spiral? Do peach cobblers drive you wild? Is a bowl of ice cream with sprinkles worse than jezebel outside your window?
I've gotta wonder... How expensive are these little networked e-ink displays? Probably not super expensive, but they've gotta be more than a paper price tag. Definitely more of a hassle to replace when someone breaks them by running into them, accidentally snapping them off, etc...
But more expensive than the wage of the person to go around replacing them for weekly sales? Walking back and forth to make a new tag to fill in an empty spot when something runs out?
Paper tags arent as easily damaged.
I don't believe they are networked. No article mentions this. I have those in France and see employees "update" the tags with a handheld device, which suggests that there is no network at all. Maybe an underpowered bluetooth or NFC, but definitely not a network.
$8 (I'm assuming Dollarydoos). At least according to the article (it's hidden in the caption of a photo). And it cites Reddit...
My local store can not even get a reliable source of staple foods (the distributor often shorts them milk, meat or whatever), there is no way this:
A) Works
B) Is adopted by any non large store
C) Is accepted as anything but a hated cash grab
I've already seen them in several stores near me, including Walmart. The entire store was switched over to them.
They already do this in Korea. I don't know if they are actually changing prices moment-to-moment, but they are using e-ink price tags that are impossible to distinguish from their printed, paper brethren. I saw one glitch out one day, and that was the only way I could tell. I mean, I guess I might be able to tell if I hunched down and inspected one closely, but it seriously looked identical to the same old printed ones at a glance.
Fuckin called it - megacorporations are not to be trusted with digital freedom.
Abandoned grocery carts full of food might also be coming to my local supermarket.
already here. just ask the inflation (not an american)
It definitely wasn't QE.
thats the joke. that inflation is dymanic we already have it.
Or they could charge a customer more if they know the customer always buys the same product.
How so they propose changing an e-ink shelf label per customer??
Probably more timed towards certain times and demographics, but yeah it just takes a couple seconds to update and there are plenty of customers running "loyalty points apps"
Do cost accounting and play fair. Will we be doing this short-change shit forever?
Is anybody acting like this is new? Shops relabel stuff with price changes regularly, this just makes it quicker and easier - staff don't have to run around for a hour with a price gun and a bunch of shelf labels any more.
Improving how we display prices isn't the issue, that's a good move, it's how prices are decided that are the problem.
This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.
How would that work? I go to a shop and I know the price of what they are selling. It is not so easy to rapidly change prices without people noticing. There may be variations on vegetables, fish and meat according to availability but everything else has a clear price. Some products do have some seasonality or good and bad years but when I go to the shop I'll mostly be accounting for those. It would be quite strange to go to the shop one day and buy something for 5€, the following time for 6€ and another time for 4€. You see, if I know this system is in place I will just not buy it whenever it is at an higher price. Moreover, changing prices while shopping is probably illegal. I am not sure about this, but I believe in Europe large shops are obligated to clearly state the price for every product. By changing the price several times per hour I do not think that would comply with such regulations. While personalised pricing itself may be legal, and I'm not sure it is, changing the stated prices while people are shopping probably isn't. Besides, when I check out how will they charge me? This is 6€, no it was 5€ yesterday, you see the price changed to 6 while you were walking in front of it but it now is at 4€.
Well but r/n you can't adjust the price of butter 3x a day.
(maybe you can but it's stuff u don't see. With this tech, I'd be worried they'll change the price multiple times a day to minimize my wallet)
I agree that the technology isn't the problem here. It's the corporate mentality of trying to squeeze customers for all they are worth on a personal basis that is the big issue. That and surge pricing should be made illegal. Having to pay more for a thing just because a flock of other people decide to get it at the same time you do is absurd.
Man would really suck if internet cuts out to get updates when its at the lowest prices...
Those e-ink tags have been around in the UK for some time.
The displays are not the problem
Them updating on a whim is
Not sure how much longer people are going to think I'm crazy for living abroad.
Hook it up with BT id you can't turn off in your phone - bada bing
Already here in Canada.
I hate to be THAT GUY, but I have seen it used to discount stock close to expiry dates. It does not mean the prices always go up.
`Current-generation digital tags are cloud-connected and equipped with Bluetooth or NFC (short-range wireless technology used for contactless payments) to communicate with phones. A phone loaded with a shopping app can pass information to the tag about the user's identity.
The tag then briefly displays a personalised price when the shopper taps the phone.
Mr Oyefeso said retailers could also pair ESL with facial recognition, so that "prices change depending on who is in the aisle or looking at the shelf". `
Great hey, I think people will continue at woolies. The level of love for monopolies is crazy. But hey house prices are going up.
But wouldn't you be able to see the price change as other people walk by? That doesn't sound like something people would passively just be okay with. And what about when people are next to each other, what price would it display?
i believe they only show you the reciept/price at the register. its social engineering, they dont want to be inconvienced to put it back if you dont want it, and you dont want to put it back after shopping so you end up buying it anway.
What's the common way for updating these? I have some similar devices that use Wi-Fi but local stores seem to use some sort of nearby transmitter pointex towards the shelves, maybe infrared/optical
It will probably be wifi and mqtt. You don't need a whole OS to get mqtt, just a TCP/IP stack.
Possibly it will use BTLE or BT5. If the store is large enough it might make sense for staff to go around with android app and manually update some prices, in which case BT5 in SPP mode might make sense.
probably they set certain times of day where there will be surge pricing, like around 12-1pm where more people come in for lunch, and around 4-5pmish where people off work.
They seem to use infrared and or NFC for data exchange. I tried to read the NFC data with a phone app, however the data seems to be either encrypted, or it was some sort of image blob file that is shown on the display. You can read something, but it's not as trivial as reading other NFC tags.
In Spain we've had those for years now, and prices are as stupidly high in the stores with paper ones...
Finally! Cheap things when I don't need them
My grocery store has had these for a while. Dynamic price reductions are coming too. Instead of a set % off, it’ll calculate the most optimal percentage to take off based on popularity of the product, how long until expiry, etc. Just a heads up.
Thank you for telling the useful side of what this could be like. I'm on a sales team who considers options like dynamic pricing, and it is nice to know what good vs bad to look out for.
fucking lol
Yeah, shame on you. Even if this is used to make things cheaper it still fits the definition of 'discriminatory'. As a company you're not going around doing handouts, you're doing the very opposite because your whole existence relies on maximizing what you take over what you give and the more desperate someone is the more you take. Which is why rich people and business owners in general pay less for a pack of cornflakes than some poor mom raising kids on her own.