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crazygringo
Tangurena2
> Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.
Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this.
> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.
> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”
https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...
The bill involved is HB 895. Maryland's online statutes have not been updated (yet) to include the new sections.
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895E.pdf
The convention (among US state legislatures) is that existing language of statutes is in plain text, strikethrough is text to be removed and underlined is text to be added.
Aurornis
> Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this.
That's already illegal, as indicated by your link about the ongoing lawsuits.
ryandrake
Doesn't that depend on the state? I'm almost sure there are quite a few states that allow stores to charge a higher price at checkout than what the product is labeled with on the shelf.
manwe150
Seems not contradictory to say that it legally has to match what you pay, when that is the content of the lawsuit against them, implying that their actions are illegal. Many states also already impose a stiff additional penalty for this practice (e.g. item must be sold heavily discounted or given free to any consumer that observes that the price charged at checkout differs from a price posted in the store)
crazygringo
But that's already illegal. And it's not dynamic pricing.
dTal
E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.
Aurornis
> Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets.
Phones have been randomizing and rotating MAC addresses for a long time. With enough antenna arrays you could theoretically track an individual RF source through the store but you wouldn't be able to tie it to a returning customer or identity by itself.
The days of easy external phone tracking are long over.
Your scenario is more than just a software update and dotting some i's. Pulling this off would require a lot of hardware and compute.
The best you could do is force everyone to scan prices through their phone with an app registered to them. You probably won't have many customers left when everyone gets tired of pointing their phone at everything to see their custom price.
free_bip
You're already watched by security cameras, it's not hard to do facial recognition anymore. And you have companies literally lining up to sell such facial recognition databases. It's conceivable they could determine what price you pay for groceries while your car is on the way to the store, thanks to Flock.
crazygringo
I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
svachalek
I think they're conflating/confusing a bunch of different things here. E-ink tags let stores run sales more often, offer "happy hour" time of day discounts, etc. It's not so much individualized (other than probably some demographic targeting, like raising prices 5-6 pm when well employed people are picking stuff up on the way home).
The personalized pricing is usually by having everyone pay through an app. The app knows your buying history and tracks everything you do so they can fine tune their deals for you, surfacing discounts on things that pull you into the store, running e-coupons when it knows you're price conscious, etc. etc.
Both systems are fair on the surface but exploit the asymmetry of billion dollar information systems vs the average consumer. All of these tweaks ensure they get the maximum amount of money that they can out of their customer base which means on average everyone ends up paying more, all while being very hard to point to exactly how you got screwed.
t-3
In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.
hansvm
IME there usually isn't much contention looking at the same section of shelf. If I'm looking at the cured meats, I'm the only person looking at any shelves within 6ft either direction. Other nearby people are walking past, looking at shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, waiting for me to finish before checking the meats, etc. The algorithm doesn't have to optimize for literally every person/sale to still have a lot of impact.
chongli
They don't have to be that specific. They can look at you and the other customers in the store in aggregate, and raise/lower prices accordingly.
If you're poor and you're a in store full of millionaires, you'll end up paying millionaire prices, unless it's for an item the millionaires rarely buy.
idiotsecant
Just show a barcode. Scan to reveal your personal price. Maybe bundle it with coupons to make people accept it easier.
dTal
Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
etchalon
They just get rid of the prices on the shelves.
lokar
For individual discrimination (vs neighborhood or time of day), one way would be what Macdonalds does:
- raise all the prices
- have an app (with an account) to give personalized discounts
- use “AI” (or, just a regular program) to pick the optimal set of discounts per person, squeezing as much as you can out of them
xp84
As a person who can't help being cheap, I do use all the fast food apps, and hate the dog-slowness of each one of them. It has been really interesting though, to see immediately when someone at McD or Wendy's HQ turns the discounting knob. McDonalds turned theirs down (for me?? who knows?) years ago, and Wendy's (sometime last year?) abruptly curtailed what used to be a really worthwhile regime (often giving any of a small burger, a drink, or fries for free with purchase) to one that usually just gives $1 off an item.
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caconym_
> So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.
Can't you just (in principle) use facial recognition cameras to determine who is approaching an item, calculate a "personalized" price and display it before they pick up the item, then make sure you match it at checkout? You could even use computer vision to only update price labels when people aren't looking at them, predict walking trajectories to pre-load prices and pre-resolve conflicts, and in ambiguous/low-confidence situations you could fall back on a default price.
This all sounds a bit like science fiction, but there is some prior art with Amazon's retail experiments, and it seems like this sort of thing is getting easier and cheaper all the time.
edit: some people have noted that you can have prices only visible viable via scanning qr codes, which makes this all much simpler. But I think you could do it with visible price labels too---you would lose some opportunities to jack up prices e.g. when multiple people are in close proximity to an item, but you could still profit in the (likely a majority of) situations where that's not the case.
Starman_Jones
The use case that jumps out at me is long tail items and whales. Let’s say that you’re a wine store, and you have an assortment of nice Italian wines all priced at $40 (to make it tidy). You’ve priced them competitively to attract your Chianti drinkers to step up and splurge if it’s a special occasion. A customer walks in, and the system recognizes that’s it’s Giovanni Vinoamore. Giovanni only comes in twice a year, but when he does, he leaves with two dozen bottles of Brunello and Barolo. It automatically raises the price of all those $40 bottles to $50. In the moment, you don’t care if a Chianti drinker puts a bottle of Barolo back, because you’ll make way more than that off of Giovanni. Once Giovanni leaves, the prices return to $40.
handoflixue
But how do you do that without people noticing? If I pick up a $40 bottle of wine, and it's suddenly $50 when I hit the register, that's fraudulent pricing - you advertised one price when I picked up the project, but a different one because Giovanni is now in the shop.
Starman_Jones
This problem already exists in retail. Pricing algorithms are easy to run, and paper tags are difficult to change frequently or in bulk. Every store will honor the posted price, but within that there’s still a range of responses between “make the customer happy” and “the onus is on the customer to prove that the register price is incorrect.” Digital signage really tips the scales against the customers proving that the price is wrong, but I expect that most companies will adopt policies closer to the “make the customer happy” end of the spectrum. It’s not worth fighting about $10, especially if you both know they’re right.
toast0
> Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.
lmkg
The difference is that early-bird pricing is transparent and predictable. There is a written, known policy of $X discount during specific hours. You can plan for it. It's never a surprise.
Dynamic pricing means sometimes you go there, and Wendy's decides on the fly whether you get a lower price and how much. It gives Wendy's the option to pinch pennies how they see fit for their own benefit, rather than offering a deal which you can choose to accept.
crazygringo
I can't tell if you're implying that Wendy's was going to offer different prices to different customers "on the fly", but that wasn't the case.
It was store-wide with updated prices shown clearly. Yes it could change on a daily basis, but you would also expect it to be roughly predictable because the whole point is to get more people to come in when it's cheaper.
Saying that Wendy's is "pinching pennies" doesn't make any sense.
conductr
Not fast food though. We have different expectations at different types of establishments
Fast food prices are pretty sticky. We consumers don’t like anything changing or being dynamic. But it is was a communications failure. If they slowly raised the prices then announced time based discounts, like how a happy hour works then it probably would have been fine. Sonic does this. But dynamic and surge pricing means I never know what it’s going to cost until I’m ordering. That’s obviously a stupid strategy for budget dining.
snohobro
It wasn’t really interpreted as “cheaper than normal from this time to this time” but as “we’re increasing meal prices during rush hours, at our sole discretion, whenever we feel like it. Too bad if you paid $4.99 yesterday at the same time, today it’s $7.99 because more people are physically here.” Even if that wasn’t quite how it was going to work, that’s all anyone heard.
dylan604
They were wanting to charge more during the rush and not just give discounts. It was closer to Uber's surge pricing.
snide
Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone.
This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.
crazygringo
I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores.
It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores.
But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.
foxyv
You see it a lot in "Convenience Stores" at gas stations now. I refuse to purchase anything like this.
lastofthemojito
Here's an example (not mine): https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/...
I also saw this in a gas station convenience store near me but I did not take a photo. I haven't seen it in a real grocery store yet.
iamnothere
I think this would be illegal in many places. A number of states require prices to be visibly posted, and some also require unit price to be shown.
alt_4577
Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).
nsxwolf
So we’re now going to spend several hours at the grocery store, scanning every item and waiting for some app to come back with a custom price?
xethos
Everyone seems to be discussing physical, in-person shopping. Multiple stores near me do "Click'n'collect", where one picks out items online and just drives to the store to collect them (for example) on the way home from work
Surveillance pricing something like that, pretty much entirely online? I think we can all imagine how to set that up without too much trouble
xnx
Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.
everdrive
>Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility.
Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
The only answer I see anyone suggest is _more_ complexity. "This complex system we've built is flawed. I know what to do: I'll add another layer of complexity and abstraction on top of it."
"Needing" buying agents would be the worst possible outcome. How could I possibly trust the buying agent? Wouldn't that agent just take funds from companies to promote their products as suggestions?
iamnothere
> Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
This is the way, but also, places like eBay are increasingly “professionalized” by huge resellers and refurbishers who squeeze out any possible margin. I’ve also noticed that thrift and consignment stores aren’t such a bargain anymore. You can often get a better deal from large retailers when they go on clearance.
P2P transactions still pay off but it’s not as easy as it used to be.
everdrive
That's good to know regarding ebay. I don't use it much, but I wasn't aware. Agreed with regard to thrift stores. Some of them have seen quite a lot of inflation. I think it's yard sales and minimalism for me.
tdeck
> Or I'll just buy as little as possible and buy used whenever possible.
You're forgetting that consuming newly created products is the only way to express yourself or gain a modicum of fleeting happiness. Also, if you're not consuming, you can't "vote with your dollar" which is of course the most effective way in history for ordinary people to hold the powerful accountable.
DavidPeiffer
Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.
I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.
everdrive
>but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across
And 100% of these products and features are trash, as are the companies pushing them.
jbxntuehineoh
shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.
shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.
yoyohello13
That's just called progress. What are you a Luddite or something?
BobbyJo
Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.
zbentley
I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing.
To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are socially beneficial, but adopting it as an ideology rather than piecemeal is not). I think your point is generally correct: if your goal is an efficient free market, then price transparency is important. But that's just my hunch as to what the counterargument would be.
loa_in_
Sounds like something Macx character from the book Accelerando would do.
ngcazz
Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.
Henchman21
Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.
zbentley
Citizens in the developed world have been heavily surveilled for decades. All of them. And the penetration/rate of increase of surveillance has been increasing rapidly.
There are plenty of downsides to that, and I don't agree or think it's beneficial, on balance. But "citizens require a lack of surveillance" is far from the present-day truth, or even remotely practical as an aspiration.
throwaway85825
Citizens require the ability to surveil the watchers. When flock data was FOIAd for the politicians license plates the flock data was exempted from FOIA so fast.
lotsofpulp
The only legislation needed is one that requires transparent, searchable pricing. If the sellers can use automation to set prices, then buyers can use automation to sort prices, making all the pricing games moot.
nathan_compton
Perhaps that is all that is required, but I don't want the minimum. I want a simple life with enough to live. I don't want to optimize everything and I don't want to live in a world which is trying to optimize every interaction I participate in.
saltyoldman
We need to invert the markets. Show the demand at a specific price the community is willing to pay for a given thing in a given area and let the grocery stores come down to that price, instead of having the markets guess and fail.
Like, basically how an exchange works. We should go massively capitalistic with purchasing everything, even gum.
zbentley
Inelasticity and segmenting "the community" is the problem here, like always.
Demand price-point for antibiotics across the community when the average use-case is a road rash? Low.
Demand price-point for antibiotics for a community member with a life-threatening lung infection? Asymptotically higher.
See also: home insurance during wildfires, water during a drought/heatwave, masks during a pandemic.
OptionOfT
Sadly, there is no provision in this law to allow consumers to sue the companies.
You have to report it, and then maybe the office of the Attorney General _might_ impose a fine on the grocery store:
https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/governor-moor...
> Governor Moore’s proposal builds on the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act of 2024 by specifically targeting the intersection of data surveillance and essential goods pricing. Under the new legislation, violations would be treated as an unfair or deceptive trade practice under the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. The Office of the Attorney General would enforce the measure, with merchants subject to civil penalties of up to $10,000 for a first offense and up to $25,000 for subsequent offenses.
If a grocer has the finances to deploy a system like this, they're close to the size of Kroger / Walmart. These fines are way too low.
Tangurena2
The fines need to be something big enough to notice. There are currently lots of stores with one price on the shelf with a higher price at the register. In the past, it would be easy for it to happen by mistake. Now it is happening so frequently & systematically at the smaller retailers - like Dollar General or Family Dollar - that it is becoming a noticeable issue for states with poorer communities.
> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
throwaway85825
If a state AG is required to do something it wont happen. Only creating a private right of action changes behavior.
nzach
> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.
While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.
To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
gruez
Yeah, sounds like a law that's passed because it sounds/polls good (ie. "affordability"), even though it's addressing a non-existent problem and is trivial to work around.
0cf8612b2e1e
Uber pays drivers differential rates depending on how desperate they believe the driver to be. I can believe that UberEats demands a higher premium depending on the item and what they infer about you.
gruez
Right, but the law mentioned in TFA is specifically for grocery stores
slg
>I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Why isn't this a good idea?
lotsofpulp
Buyers and sellers should be able to negotiate prices however they want. It is how markets have worked since the dawn of human trading.
It would also be costly to police.
If the problem is that a grocery store has a monopoly in an area, then that is a different problem fixed by adding grocery store(s).
slg
This is a law about grocery stores. How much haggling do you think is happening at grocery stores?
fc417fc802
Most markets have also had a wide variety of regulations. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that large retail operations would be prohibited from attempting a predatory scheme depending on individualized pricing. There's a tangible difference between one off purchase contracts and selling into the consumer market at large.
Sure, haggling was historically the standard but that just isn't the way these modern operations work. If an outdated practice gets caught in the crossfire when protecting consumers from imminent harm I'm okay with that.
sidewndr46
Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".
geremiiah
Is this why grocery stores are so keen to get you to use their coupon app or hand them your phone number? I always refuse, but I always wondered what they do with the data.
Tangurena2
The amount of "discount" is so much that they must be getting a large income stream from the data. Whenever I see something where the shelf sticker claims a lower price for "digital coupon" (meaning: use their app), I put the item back onto the shelf and move on. I'm willing to use the loyalty cards, but I am not willing to allow the sort of surveillance data that phone apps provide.
Margins on items at grocery stores is pretty thin. For them to be able to offer 50¢ or $1 off for items by using their app, that tells me that they are making more than that much from the data about me. My suspicion is that they're earning at least 10x that much from the data.
bombcar
The dirty secret is there is no income stream from the app, and the data they recover isn't worth much.
What it is is that the people who are price-conscious will clip the coupons and use the loyalty - those who are not will not.
xp84
Yup, it's that simple. And effective. As I was raised pretty poor by most people's standards, I can't help but jump through whatever annoying hoops to save a buck. But there are a lot of well-off people who would find it kind of taboo to essentially digitally "clip coupons."
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fzeroracer
Yes, unfortunately as an example to the problem here my grocery store charges around 20-30% more for the privilege of not using the app. Eventually I relented because I needed the 'savings' and it was the only grocery store available to me.
orangecat
Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
chimeracoder
> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.
It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.
Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
jglamine
Yes, that's the joke. I think the parent post was sarcasm.
fc417fc802
Provided the criteria are transparent and directly applicable I don't see the issue. I wouldn't object to a grocery store that offered standardized discounted rates if you applied with documentation of your financial situation. Whereas an opaque operation with the goal of maximizing the final bill on an individual basis using entirely arbitrary criteria is dystopian and clearly extremely consumer hostile.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
bombcar
Grocery stores already do this! Why do you think there's "senior discount day"?
The thing is nobody will pay more than the advertised price so they want to not list a higher price, and then offer discounts. They do it via coupons and other mechanisms, but they'll never get anyone to pay $20 for a $5 bottle of Coke.
richwater
> Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.
Or, gasp, cut bloat.
aquir
This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned
lotsofpulp
>Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost!
Go to a food market in a developing country, and that is how it works. Everyone is haggling for everything all the time.
Loughla
Except with haggling, I can talk the price down to keep it in my budget. That's stressful and unnecessary really, but at least there is an avenue to lower the price inherent in the system.
Try haggling at somewhere like wal mart. Go to a cashier, or hell, the store manager and try to get them to reduce the price.
rockskon
Sadly the law Maryland passed contains enough loopholes and preemptions that it is literally worse than having passed nothing at all.
beasthacker
I worry that increasingly sophisticated dynamic pricing could one day make it nearly impossible for anyone to get ahead.
felooboolooomba
Saturday afternoon and you want a steak? $300.
class3shock
Considering we are getting there without it... yeah, definitely not looking good.
int32_64
Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.
Tangurena2
Culturally, Americans do not haggle and do not to well in cultures where haggling is the norm. It would take a massive cultural shift before negotiating price is even close to normal. Part of this is why so many employees do poorly when negotiating salary during the interview process.
Disclaimer: my father was in the oil business and we lived a lot in the Middle East among other places.
Loughla
Americans don't do well with anything perceived as confrontation, speaking in general terms. Haggling is on that list. It's why my son sold so damn much popcorn sitting outside of a grocery store for the boy scouts. He asked everyone, and a wide majority of people are too polite to just say no thank you.
I don't know why it is, because Americans are also pretty aggressive about certain topics. But confrontation, even low stakes like price haggling, is a problem.
solnyshok
or you will ask bids for your shopping list, and get replies from several retail chains (or, rather their AI agents).
culi
More Perfect did a great investigation on this and Instacart
bilsbie
Is it weird to be pro free market but to be against this kind of pricing?
I can’t seem to square the positions.
fireflash38
Free market depends on relatively equal knowledge. If there is significant knowledge disparity it's no longer free.
Internet initially helped consumers with knowledge. Now that balance has shifted to more and more corporations knowing more.
If we enshrine into law significant privacy expectations, that can restore the knowledge balance.
CivBase
Depends on what you mean by "free market". If you think "free market" means market participants should just be free to do whatever they want then yeah, it's weird. But if you think "free market" means that products and prices should be determined by supply/demand and a competitive race to the bottom between market participants, then it's not weird at all.
HaZeust
I mean if you're a laissez-faire capitalist, you can't have it both ways.
But if you believe in anti-trust, regulation, and competition as external checks (typically enacted through governments) on capitalism's power - then you can indeed square the two positions.
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Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store.
Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.
So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.
Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.
Also, this law excludes loyalty programs and promotional offers, which seems to be the main way that groceries have engaged in dynamic pricing in reality -- the advertised price doesn't change, but they give certain people certain coupons. And of course, my parents were clipping coupons from newspapers decades ago, as richer people couldn't be bothered, whereas people trying to make ends meet was clip and save religiously.