The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.

“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.

Apps like Uber already use surge pricing, in which higher demand leads to higher prices in real time. Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently. Electronic shelf labels allow the same strategy to be applied at grocery stores, but are not the only reason why retailers may make the switch.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If it’s hot outside we can raise the price of water…”

    Holy fuck dude that’s some endgame capitalism right there.

    • dudeami0A
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      7 months ago

      Is it price gouging if there is a heat advisory is my question, and how enforceable is that. For water it’s just cruel, especially in places with little access to drinkable tap water.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        7 months ago

        The fucked up thing is that it’ll have to get legislated. Like there will be a bill that says you can’t price gouge on water in a heat advisory.

        And the more fucked up thing is that it’ll be controversial.

        And then you realize that this is why we can’t have nice things. We can’t all just play nice together on our own, no, as much as we all claim to hate daddy government, we need him to come down and remind us that shit like this is anti-human and start defining rules that really should have just been common decency in the first place.

        Like how I feel when I tell my younger kid to stop throwing forks in the house. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. I told you yesterday, and the day before. And I told you three times today to stop throwing things. And then I get forked in the arse.

    • satanmat@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yes. That is actually the point. MUST maximize that profit!

      Airlines do this now, as does Uber.

      The tech is only just catching up for retail. This is end game capitalism hope you enjoyed the ride.

    • Zier@fedia.io
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      7 months ago

      My answer to Walmart’s greed is… Some of us don’t buy bottled water, so feel free to raise it to $100 a bottle.

      • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        right, but some people do, and by encouraging this, you’re fucking over your fellow humans.

        edit: There are also situations where you don’t have a choice but to buy water bottles. maybe you’re out of your home, your personal bottle is empty, and it’s hot out. maybe you’re at the airport. sure you could drink from water fountains, but what if they’re nowhere near you? or what if they don’t work?

          • woodenskewer@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            The next town over from me, if you wash a white shirt in the washing machine it comes out with a tint of brown. We drink bottled water.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I supposed it depends on the country, but as far as I know in most of Europe you can just enter a coffee shop or the local equivalent and ask for a glass of tap water.

          Mind you, even though I bought a metal water bottle years ago and almost never buy bottled water nowadays, as you say sometimes it happens that one needs, though its rare and it’s highly unlikely I would be going to a supermarket to buy water.

          • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            oh, Europe, yeah that makes sense. see I live in bumfuck America where they’ll tell you to get fucked and then shoot your kid

    • brlemworld@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Water is free/cheap though. They have a water fountain. You have plumbing into your living space with a virtually limitless supply.

  • ryan213@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    So what if you placed some water in your cart, walked around and then they raise the price before you check out? How does that work?

    • frickineh@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      They’re going to end up with a bunch of people complaining to the manager about the price not matching the sign, which already happens, but it’ll be 10x worse.

        • frickineh@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The thing that sucks is that the managers aren’t going to be the ones with the power to do that. Then again, all of my managers were spineless as fuck when I worked in a grocery store (literally never had employees’ backs), so they’ll probably just do an override on the price anyway.

          • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Managers like that suck. When I was a manager in retail whenever I made a choice that may have agreed with or disagreed with one of my Team’s opinions or choices I always stopped to explain my reasoning and sought to make sure they understood. Taught my whole team how to deal with shit without needing me present, though I also reminded them that the instant it became too much they were to call me up.

            No one fucks with my crew. Though I also knew the best thing I could do for them was stand in front only when I needed to, not every time if they wanted to handle it.

            • frickineh@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I wish they’d all been more like you. Instead, all of the ones I had until my mid 20s were the kind of people who would tell us the policy was X and we absolutely could not do Y, and the second a customer bitched, suddenly Y was fine and they made us look like liars or idiots.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      There are laws in many states governing many items clearly articulating that the price cannot change during business hours/within a business day.

      Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.

      • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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        Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.

        That depends on who is in charge of the country at any given time. Three-letter entities have a way of being hamstrung during conservative administrations.

        The next time conservatives have control, though, it will likely be permanent. The FTC would certainly be dismantled.

  • geekworking@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Just wait until they track your phone in the stores and tie it to demographics like where you live and profession to build a financial profile to estimate how much you are able to pay. As you walk down aisles, the prices change to your price to gouge out every possible penny from you.

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      The true cyberpunk dystopia. They ultimately want to keep you as close to destitute without actually being bankrupt as possible, that way they extract as much as possible from you at all times for as long as they can.

      Capitalism will always try to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.

    • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I can see this happening 100%. It’s already kind of a thing in home renovation and construction. Some businesses will charge you a higher hourly labor rate if your materials are expensive. Installing tile or whatever should be the same labor rate, but they assume customers buying expensive materials “must be rich” and won’t blink at paying more for labor, too. They don’t all do this, of course, but it’s something to watch out for (and one of many reasons you should always get multiple estimates from different contractors).

      • Steve@startrek.website
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        7 months ago

        Expensive tile tends to be fragile, and its assumed the customer will expect more precise work, so not a great analogy

        • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Tile was just an example. Applies to paint and everything else. I will use the contractor who doesn’t do this upcharging nonsense. If you want to pay more for no reason, you do you!

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          7 months ago

          Ideally, we should trust one large company to manage paying them as little as possible for us. Probably through an app, so they can slurp up data on us to decide how much we’d pay for the service

    • krelvar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is just a great opportunity for a poor person to rent their phone out, you gotta look for the silver lining in the capitalism!

    • jpeps@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This as exactly my thought. It’s not crazy to imagine this when I know for a fact systems exist in supermarkets to calculate optimal prices in different stores, based on the size of the store, the demographics of the area it’s in etc

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Both Apple and Android randomize MAC addresses now, so the easiest form of tracking is already dead.

          I like the idea of cloing “low prices” identifiers, but you would need an inside man letting thr app know what those are, and at that point the Corpos could also get that info.

          Im sure these systems try various other fingerprinting. The most likely is the apps they all push on you for discounts and curbside pickup now. They likely have location data/etc all turned on and tracking, along with your all your purchaing data to micro target you.

          I’d expect “kill all radio signals” to be the most direct answer that they can’t hack around. The old ways are sometimes best.

  • 3volver@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.

    If people are starving after a natural disaster, we can raise the price of everything because they’re desperate and have no alternatives.

    • Captain Janeway@lemmy.world
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      Are we to judge simple supply and demand now? If they haven’t been smart enough to save for a disaster, then perhaps they deserve what they get. If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Bah. Humbug. A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every natural disaster.

      /S

  • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    How is this not considered false advertising? You go to a shelf and see your favorite snack on sale, you grab it. Finish the rest of your selections and go to check out.

    By the time you get there the price of your snack is no longer what was shown on the shelf.

    If it isn’t false advertising, it’s bait and switch.