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.
> 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.”
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There's a store in my neighborhood that only does app purchases and a little robot brings it out to your car. It's nice getting cilantro that hasn't been picked over by a hundred people, but I don't like shopping for groceries online, and AFAIK you can't actually enter the store.
Its probably easier these days for a customer to fight the checkout price than it would be for the store to implement surge pricing or whatever they want to do. Just take a timestamped photo of the price when you pluck the product off the shelf and compare it at the register. We could probably make an app that does all the calculating for you to verify and the only thing one would need to do is take a bunch of pictures as they shop, which is fairly trivial.
personally, I think grocery stores do it in reverse. They raise prices across the board, and lower them if you give them your data for a loyalty program.
Even though the price goes down, they adjust prices for you based on your personal data. You pay more if you don't give it up.
How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time.
> How will the can of peas know which price to display
People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time.
Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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't claim omniscience but my understanding is that 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.
One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.
That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
You might think that grocery stores in poor neighborhoods have lower prices than wealthier neighborhoods (because poorer customers are more likely to shop around for bargains). The opposite is true. Wealthy customers have the time, energy and money to be able to shop around. Poor people are stuck in "food deserts".
Some thought experiments for you:
1. This store is located between your employer and your home. The time is "right after typical working hours". The presumption that the algorithm can predict is that you're picking something up from the store to make for dinner, therefore you have no time to price shop and therefore we can charge you more because you have to have it now.
2. American shoppers tend to have very high brand loyalty. If you always buy product_A and never product_B, then the algorithm can charge you more for product_A because your demand is quite inflexible.
> I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
There are lots of evil people out there working very hard at extracting more than their fair share of wealth from others. Far too many people believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" - that "what goes around comes around". There are lots of random bad things and bad people that hurt innocent people. There might actually be some positive benefit that could come from surveillance pricing. However, once you've known or worked with some of the more predatory people then you'll see just how hard this technology can be used to screw others.
Not defending the legitimately douchey things amazon does, but it explains it right in that article :
>In short, an Amazon listing features prices not only offered by Amazon, but by other sellers. Some of these sellers may offer the items at a lower price, but the order will not be fulfilled by Amazon and won’t be subject to Prime’s shipping discounts and faster delivery.
If you're a prime member and logged it, it will prioritize purchases fulfilled by amazon and delivered with prime delivery. If you click "Other sellers on amazon" there will sometimes be sellers that are cheaper with shipping than purchasing through prime.
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.
Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they don't have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."
This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.
There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.
Sometimes, you may not have an Aldi near you. Also, many people may not have the luxury of going to grocery stores because they have to work in an office for 8–9 hours.
"too high for my liking" is doing a lot of work there.
Some of these loans are outright predatory, with multi-thousand-percent interest rates. These aren't loans that people who have better options are taking, and moreover I think a lot of people really don't understand how horrible that can be. Call your congressperson to get more funding for math education, and then maybe we can argue we should get rid of usury laws.
I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans? Sure, I suppose in a sense, but these are extremely desperate people and it is hard to say that what they opted into is "consent" in the classic sense of the term. They only take these loans because they feel like they don't have other options, not because they were able to compare rates across different banks and choose the best, and upon accepting these loans they can very easily get into situations where paying off the debt is functionally impossible.
Not sure how I feel about selling organs so I won't touch that one.
> I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans?
That also leads into complex questions like "is it really consent if the alternative is X", or "can someone consent to chattel slavery", or "at what point is chemical addiction no longer consensual", etc.
_______________
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered [Monsieur] Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
I hadn't heard that particular quote. I was thinking Squid Game :)
I do pretty ok now, but in 2016, I was completely broke. I was unemployed for awhile, but even after becoming employed it felt like I couldn't catch up with my debt. Even though I know they're basically scams, and I know how to calculate compound interest, and I know math better than the average American, I still considered one of those scammy payday loan places, just because the high interest was "Tom in a few month from now"'s problem. Fortunately I didn't have to go that far, and things did pick up, and I feel lucky for that.
I think about that situation a lot; it was a very humbling moment. I guess I hadn't fully realized beforehand that the right combination of circumstances can really make people who would otherwise know better make objectively bad decisions.
Life is already pretty hard even when things are going fine. We don't need assholes weaponizing circumstances for when they aren't.
How much my food costs is quite consequential, and I think it's very important to understand whether or not a business has some hackneyed algorithm that tells them to charge me 50% more than the man standing next to me.
It's only good for the man. It's not good for me. If you think I'm selfish, then you have no guarantee that it's the other man who would pay more and only I would get the discount.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
They just get rid of the prices on the shelves.
Just show a barcode. Scan to reveal your personal price. Maybe bundle it with coupons to make people accept it easier.
Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They were wanting to charge more during the rush and not just give discounts. It was closer to Uber's surge pricing.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
You see it a lot in "Convenience Stores" at gas stations now. I refuse to purchase anything like this.
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.
There's a store in my neighborhood that only does app purchases and a little robot brings it out to your car. It's nice getting cilantro that hasn't been picked over by a hundred people, but I don't like shopping for groceries online, and AFAIK you can't actually enter the store.
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.
Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).
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?
Its probably easier these days for a customer to fight the checkout price than it would be for the store to implement surge pricing or whatever they want to do. Just take a timestamped photo of the price when you pluck the product off the shelf and compare it at the register. We could probably make an app that does all the calculating for you to verify and the only thing one would need to do is take a bunch of pictures as they shop, which is fairly trivial.
personally, I think grocery stores do it in reverse. They raise prices across the board, and lower them if you give them your data for a loyalty program.
Even though the price goes down, they adjust prices for you based on your personal data. You pay more if you don't give it up.
Is the weather forecast calling for significant snow accumulations? Increase bread prices.
That's how
Facial recognition
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
> There’s hundreds of people in the store.
Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time.
> How will the can of peas know which price to display
People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time.
Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.
A lot of grocery stores allow ordering online for pickup or delivery.
They remove the pricetags and replace them with a shopping ap able to track your habits and maximize your spending.
This already happens online. Try getting two people to book a vacation, one on a new iphone and one using an ancient android. Prices will differ.
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
That's just called progress. What are you a Luddite or something?
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.
Sounds like something Macx character from the book Accelerando would do.
Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.
Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.
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.
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.
I worry that increasingly sophisticated dynamic pricing could one day make it nearly impossible for anyone to get ahead.
Saturday afternoon and you want a steak? $300.
> 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.
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.
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.
Right, but the law mentioned in TFA is specifically for grocery stores
From TFA
That says nothing about the driver?
>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?
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).
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.
This is a law about grocery stores. How much haggling do you think is happening at grocery stores?
I routinely ask the cashier for half off on anything that is perfectly fine but has less-than-pristine packaging. I usually get it.
(But I understand this isn't really relevant to the article or discussion here.)
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".
There are special laws made to protect the dealer's position. This is an exception not the rule.
You should justify why it is improving price (or something) for consumers if you want to hold it up as an example.
That is a pretty good example of why these laws are not OK.
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.
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...
Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.
> 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.
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't claim omniscience but my understanding is that 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.
Yes, that's the joke. I think the parent post was sarcasm.
> 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.
Is it weird to be pro free market but to be against this kind of pricing?
I can’t seem to square the positions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
Sadly the law Maryland passed contains enough loopholes and preemptions that it is literally worse than having passed nothing at all.
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.
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.
or you will ask bids for your shopping list, and get replies from several retail chains (or, rather their AI agents).
More Perfect did a great investigation on this and Instacart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo
If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.
That's called cartel pricing and its illegal.
Is it excessive? Expensive, certainly, but if I wanted cheap I'd go live in shack in the mountains.
One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.
That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
You might think that grocery stores in poor neighborhoods have lower prices than wealthier neighborhoods (because poorer customers are more likely to shop around for bargains). The opposite is true. Wealthy customers have the time, energy and money to be able to shop around. Poor people are stuck in "food deserts".
Some thought experiments for you:
1. This store is located between your employer and your home. The time is "right after typical working hours". The presumption that the algorithm can predict is that you're picking something up from the store to make for dinner, therefore you have no time to price shop and therefore we can charge you more because you have to have it now.
2. American shoppers tend to have very high brand loyalty. If you always buy product_A and never product_B, then the algorithm can charge you more for product_A because your demand is quite inflexible.
This post of mine from a few days ago has links you might be interested in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848128
> I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
There are lots of evil people out there working very hard at extracting more than their fair share of wealth from others. Far too many people believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" - that "what goes around comes around". There are lots of random bad things and bad people that hurt innocent people. There might actually be some positive benefit that could come from surveillance pricing. However, once you've known or worked with some of the more predatory people then you'll see just how hard this technology can be used to screw others.
Do stores need minute by minute pricing? Could they just update prices at the end of the day?
All 50 states should do this. It's violently anti-consumer to price in this manner.
Dude, this "surveillance pricing" is fucking bullshit. Good on them.
Hope you renewed your Prime membership because they're the worst offender.
Do different Prime members get different prices?
https://dailydot.com/amazon-charging-more-prime-members
It appears so, yes. And prime pays more per item.
Not defending the legitimately douchey things amazon does, but it explains it right in that article :
>In short, an Amazon listing features prices not only offered by Amazon, but by other sellers. Some of these sellers may offer the items at a lower price, but the order will not be fulfilled by Amazon and won’t be subject to Prime’s shipping discounts and faster delivery.
If you're a prime member and logged it, it will prioritize purchases fulfilled by amazon and delivered with prime delivery. If you click "Other sellers on amazon" there will sometimes be sellers that are cheaper with shipping than purchasing through prime.
Just going to Aldi and shopping for yourself insulates you from this nonsense, no?
ETA: Aldi here is representing any store without a loyalty program
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.
This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.
Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
i really doubt the downsides of adding that layer of complexity can compete with the upsides of surveillance pricing.
FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they don't have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."
This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.
There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.
TBH as a shopper it works great.
Sometimes, you may not have an Aldi near you. Also, many people may not have the luxury of going to grocery stores because they have to work in an office for 8–9 hours.
dirtbag egalitarianism wins again
This is so embarrassing. I can’t imagine being concerned about something so inconsequential. Just go to another grocery store.
Banning a pricing model should be unconstitutional
> Banning a pricing model should be unconstitutional
"Unconscionable contracts" and "Usury" called--you're behind on your debt and your kidney is being seized. :p
There's also some not-so-fun history there when it comes to charging people based on their skin-color.
The concept of usury is so silly.
“Oh no, someone is offering me a loan at a rate that is too high for my liking!”
Organ markets should be legal as well.
"too high for my liking" is doing a lot of work there.
Some of these loans are outright predatory, with multi-thousand-percent interest rates. These aren't loans that people who have better options are taking, and moreover I think a lot of people really don't understand how horrible that can be. Call your congressperson to get more funding for math education, and then maybe we can argue we should get rid of usury laws.
I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans? Sure, I suppose in a sense, but these are extremely desperate people and it is hard to say that what they opted into is "consent" in the classic sense of the term. They only take these loans because they feel like they don't have other options, not because they were able to compare rates across different banks and choose the best, and upon accepting these loans they can very easily get into situations where paying off the debt is functionally impossible.
Not sure how I feel about selling organs so I won't touch that one.
> I guess I feel like the term "consent" is weaponized; did people opt into these loans?
That also leads into complex questions like "is it really consent if the alternative is X", or "can someone consent to chattel slavery", or "at what point is chemical addiction no longer consensual", etc.
_______________
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered [Monsieur] Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
-- The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by GK Chesterton [https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500421h.html]
I hadn't heard that particular quote. I was thinking Squid Game :)
I do pretty ok now, but in 2016, I was completely broke. I was unemployed for awhile, but even after becoming employed it felt like I couldn't catch up with my debt. Even though I know they're basically scams, and I know how to calculate compound interest, and I know math better than the average American, I still considered one of those scammy payday loan places, just because the high interest was "Tom in a few month from now"'s problem. Fortunately I didn't have to go that far, and things did pick up, and I feel lucky for that.
I think about that situation a lot; it was a very humbling moment. I guess I hadn't fully realized beforehand that the right combination of circumstances can really make people who would otherwise know better make objectively bad decisions.
Life is already pretty hard even when things are going fine. We don't need assholes weaponizing circumstances for when they aren't.
No they shouldn’t be.
Disagree :)
I just don't think it would be a good thing for people to be selling off their organs in a commercial fashion.
I understand, and I disagree with you, I think it would be a good thing.
How much my food costs is quite consequential, and I think it's very important to understand whether or not a business has some hackneyed algorithm that tells them to charge me 50% more than the man standing next to me.
Why is it a bad thing that the man next to you pays 50% less?
It's only good for the man. It's not good for me. If you think I'm selfish, then you have no guarantee that it's the other man who would pay more and only I would get the discount.
It’s not good for anyone to pay more for anything. That doesn’t mean we create price control laws or make everything free lol
>That doesn’t mean we create price control laws or make everything free lol
I'm not suggesting anything of the sort.
You’re supporting a price control law right now.
No, I just hate what the company is doing. I don't even live in MD and have no say in the law whatsoever.
You’re supporting it in your comment.
It's so embarrassing that we banned forcing employees to work sixteen hour days without lunch breaks. Just go to another employer.
Banning an employment model should be unconstitutional.
You're not even allowed to pay them in company scrip anymore!
For now. There are some of the billionaires wanting to bring back company towns and company scrip.
Fully agree
Many people do not have more than 1 grocery store as an option.
Good point, we should regulate pricing models in service of the 0.000001 percent of people that live in places like Kingman, Arizona.
Please go look up what a Food Desert is.
A completely made up thing?