Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

It's definitely possible for a job to have negative expected value for the employee, even if looking only at cash flow. MLMs are the most obvious way, but e.g. hairdressers often need to rent their station in the store -- while this can be a reasonable deal, it can also run negative.

How would that work? The barcode on the item doesn't get rewritten, the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item. Even if they did assign unique barcodes to each item, what happens if you take the item off the shelf, and put it in someone else's cart? They'd be charged the wrong price for the item.

Your plan fails in a few ways.

Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy.

This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to implement price discrimination. Basic ESLs cost $3 to $12, depending on size and use very little energy. Adding a camera means more energy, so a bigger battery and more cost.

Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.

part of the reason I don't go there anymore. I noticed recently taco bell in my area no longer asks about their app, just takes my order.

I think McDonalds dynamic pricing is great. Every time I checkout the app there is some crazy deal. Sure its not always something I want but I'm not necessarily competing w/ the other items on the menu. If there's no deal on something I want, I check BK or similar chains.

> It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.

I don't think it should be allowed. It's predatory. It allows a company like Uber and Lyft to see things like "Oh, you are going to a hospital, then I'm going to apply a 10% surcharge because you are probably desperate".

It also works against the drivers. Uber/Lyft see things like "This person is logged on for 8 hours, they are desperate, so let's give them lower rates and worse routes."

Yeah, I think time-based algorithmic pricing is good and helps reduce shortages. As long as everyone can get the same price at the same time, I have no issues with how that price was arrived at. What concerns me is different consumers being offered different prices at the same time.

It’s interesting, no matter what the sign says, the cost is determined at the checkout. I think you missed the point.

This is about profiling people buying through apps.

I guess it’s neat someone is trying to do something about grocery prices, this won’t move the needle. Still nice to have in the books.

Now if only the governer could figure out how to get the Key bridge built instead of firing the company and starting over… that would be cool.

“Yeah it’ll be built by 2028!” At this point I doubt it’ll be finished in my lifetime.

The electronic shel labels use e-ink. Their refresh time is around 30 seconds. What happens if two shoppers are looking at the same product?

Since you get a location and time stamped receipt these shenanigans would be completely trivial to detect.

It’s hard to talk about without sounding conspiratorial because it literally is an unfounded conspiracy. The impracticalities of this scheme are immediately obvious and no evidence of it ever actually being implemented in physical retail exists.

I would say it would "squeeze" every customer for every dollar they are willing to pay. Perhaps semantics, apologies if so.

I have no problem with this for luxuries like Netflix which have sufficient competition (I am not saying Netflix has sufficient competition - I don't watch much TV, but I assume there is at least some: HBO Max, Disney+, others?)

I think I have a problem with this for literal necessities such as food, water, air.

I believe the solution to these problems is competition. If there is only one grocery store available to me, that store can set prices at whatever they want. If there are 20 stores near me - they are going to have to compete on price. I know plenty of very wealthy people near me who still get many of their groceries from Walmart.

If my mother is dying, but there are literally 1000 safe, fast ways for me to get to her in a hurry, the price is going to be reasonable unless there is some legislation which enforces some minimum (which I am also against).

That does not I mean I in any way support data collection without consent.

I do agree with you that with personal data, and without competition, for-profit companies have a strong incentive to, and will, "squeeze" you for every dollar they can get.

I think some industries, such as energy, are naturally resistant to competition; and while I am generally wary of regulations, those are areas where I think regulation in the public interest makes sense. The question of course becomes which products and services are naturally resistant to competition, and necessary enough that regulation should be required. I don't think entertainment falls in this category. I don't know enough about airline travel to give an informed opinion.

That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.

> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers

This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

What happens in practice that there are only so many grocery stores where consumers can choose to shop thanks to corporate mergers and lax antitrust enforcement. So if all of them raise their prices at the same time then those consumers are out of luck.

Now technically it would be illegal for the grocery stores to collude in price fixing like that, but they'll hide behind the fact that all of them will buy their surveillance pricing data from Google [1].

Google will tell all of the competitors exactly how much they can charge you for your eggs, and you'll get the same price everywhere.

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-...

> If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.

How would you do it if pricing is dynamic and changes every day?

By the time competitor finds out about the price, you might have already reduced it, making it look like theirs is more expensive even after they applied discount.

Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).

With both parties scrambling to buy non-taxpayer votes with taxpayer money, the list is endless. Free healthcare, free tuition, pork barrel spending, wars on behalf of other nations, lavish benefits for your ethnic group’s immigrants, etc.

> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services

Ok.

Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.

Slogans and bromides are good starting points but not solutions.

The government IS preventing coordinated price setting by closing the loophole of third party data brokers.

Bingo. Exactly. In every one of these oligopolies, the most customer-hostile behaviors spread quickly and completely, and any customer-friendly ideas anyone sneaks in fizzle out quickly.

Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way.

This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.

>And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks.

Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.

Like I personally don't know every single price at every single shop before I go, but I do know for example that Henry's Mercato or the Big Watermelon will have some kind of cheap bulk fruit, Aldi has cheaper staples, Springvale has the best fish etc. etc.

There are plenty of other places I checked out once or twice and then wrote off as a bad deal.

In my experience tickets are always cheaper on the VPN, Bulgaria, The Balkans… I just bought airline tickets that were much cheaper and I also do other bookings this way as well, I got a hotel in Philly a month ago 18% cheaper. it is not bullet-proof thing and I am not traveling all the time but I don’t recall a time I did not find at least a little bit better deal

"diverse pricing" comes across as DEI pricing, too, what with the name. And the name is what's important, not the actual idea. If you want them to be against it, call it "Socialist Pricing" or if you want them to support it call it "Freedom Pricing." I know it's not indicative of either, but it just needs to sound bad or good.

> But I guess I don't read the news.

No, you don't. Since you rely on AI to do the thinking for you.

> It feels like a partisan issue.

It feels like a non-partisan issue. There, debunked.