Technology

It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked

I will institute my own "dynamic pricing" scheme if this ever happens

remember if you see someone shoplifting food no the fuck you didnt

~~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.

Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.

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?

In other news, shoplifting is inexplicably on the rise in shops featuring dynamic pricing.....

Boycott the stores that use them, it might help them change their mind behind they become the norm.

It is morally correct to shoplift from stores that do this.

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.

Then I won't be going to that supermarket.

I'm going to start dynamic payments. "Oh, between 6-9pm I pay 10% less."

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

These have got to be hackable in a fun way

If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we'll just have to start dynamic shopping.

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.

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

They already do that, just not as frequently. They change price tags of items every day by hand

Start pushing your state gov to ban this.

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.

Free epaper displays!

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

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.

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.

Please make it stop