Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
An average store carries around 20,000 SKUs, so I understand that they’re looking for easier solutions to price updates, especially after having relatively high inflation after a couple of decades.
However, they’re already making it impossible for shoppers to track prices, and we all know soon (left to their own devices) they’re going to switch to individual pricing.
I’m surprised that the pricing issue is not being discussed in the context of online shopping already, with home deliveries on the rise.
I have zero sympathy for them. My local Safeway, despite being able to upgrade to e-Ink price tags with all this is still absolutely intended to make it impossible for consumers. Example, for the same brand of paper towel, in different sizes, the price comparison for one size is $/sheet, another, $/sqft, and another, $/roll.
They have the solutions, they just know that the more solutions are in play, the less (in theory) they'll be able to get away with shit like this.
In my country prices are often wrong because supermarkets are run by a small team of literal teenagers (one of the downsides of having decent minimum wages is that nobody wants to hire anyone if they somehow can avoid it).
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.
Surveillance pricing should be outright banned IMHO, but Cory Doctorow had an article earlier this week explaining all the ways this particular ban is broken [1].
It was probably broken by design, allowing the politicians to brag about how they're doing something, while the lobbyists managed to carve out such large loopholes for themselves that it will in likelihood never be a real deterrent.
For example: surveillance pricing is allowed if users opt-in so consider how many times you've clicked "I agree" on websites recently to get past some legalese wall of text blocking you from the content.
Another thing is you can't sue a grocery store, but you can petition the AG to sue them, which they will do only if they feel like it.
Not to mention that it applies only to grocery stores, not hotels and airlines and other industries which are inclined to do surveillance pricing
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
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.
The way McDonald's does this that they essentially offer discounts that you can only get by using the mobile app, and the mobile app can dynamically price your cart however they wish. All they (or any other business) has to do is to increase their non-mobile prices to squeeze out non-identifiable shopping.
> the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item.
Sure it can, cameras and facial recognition.
Identify a person when they enter the store. Track them with overhead cameras as they move throughout the store. Set the price for the individual when they get to checkout. It barely requires any extra infrastructure in most stores.
You don't need a unique barcode per item, you simply need to be able to identify the person purchasing the item at checkout.
Barcodes today don't contain price information (except for meat AFAIK. But then you'd mostly just need to change it to be weight instead of price).
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
If we're including promotions or membership discounts, then coupons fit this definition of price discrimination. And those have existed since the 90s at least.
The problems show up when different people don't have access to the same coupons published by the store. Most coupons are fine.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
In the UK, it's common for supermarkets to have loyalty cards (e.g. Tesco Clubcard) and then they display prices along with the price for using a loyalty card. Then, they just apply the discount (which varies according to the product) when you swipe your card before paying.
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.
I think viewing it at as a discount is framing it wrong. It’s more a fee for not using the app, and if you use the app you’ll get charged the highest price McDonald’s has decided you will pay.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
> Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds
Today's, yes, but that's really not a technology limit. EInk displays have much faster refresh rates. The main limitation is the communication, but that's a solvable problem with a smart enough networking mesh.
> multiple people can view a product simultaneously
You track the people's position. If multiple people are crowded around the same product then you can pick a price for both customers. Might not work well for crowded stores, but in that case you probably can just maximize the prices anyways as a lot of people are currently shopping.
> This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product.
No, you just need 1 customer ID on entrance to the store. Everything else can be done by tracking their position with overhead cameras. You don't need to put a camera on every product.
> 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.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
> 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.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
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."
Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
> Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
Obviously acceptable. But I'm talking about two people placing an order for the same ticket, same airline, same rewards program and getting different prices because the airline knows something about their private life. For example, maybe the airline has gotten information that one person is going to a funeral and thus are more willing to pay a higher price.
Everything about this encourages corporate espionage on private citizens which I'm opposed to. I'd rather not have google calendar secretly sharing my entries with delta so they can in turn determine what ticket price I might be willing to pay.
There's also not market fundamentals which can correct this situation. Back to the airline example, for any given route you are limited by the number of carriers to that location. Airports are physical things with limited capacity which naturally leads to monopolies and oligopolies. That means you can't just "pay someone that's not doing that" as you only have 2 or 3 options for most locations and they all want to participate in that scheme.
You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.
I'm not. alex43578 was shifting the goalposts from the point cogman10 was making; I acknowledged what he said, but it was besides the point. An airline charging differently depending on the time ahead of flight is sensible. An airline charging differently depending on the buyer's home address is discrimination.
You said "charging two people for the same route differently" is bad: airlines do that constantly and that's why there's dozens of fare changes, fare buckets, sales, codeshares, etc.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
I suppose you are misunderstanding me on purpose, but let me try again in very clear terms anyway: Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust.
What you are referring to is 'price discrimination'[1]. @alex43578 is correct in his examples. In the 'Uber/Lyft' example, his metric for service similarity in the case of a ride to the airport vs. the middle of nowhere can be seen in the distance driven. The problem is that arguments can always be made on why pricing one demographic vs another makes business sense.
In the case of Uber/Lyft, the company can say a ride to the middle of nowhere costs more than a hotspot destination because the odds of finding someone hailing another ride from there are low. This would mean the driver would have to spend more on gas picking up their next customer. Although this seems reasonable, it's probabilistic in nature. This may also not be the case, but the company must price this risk to keep their drivers happy. Well what of the case where the destination is a dangerous neighborhood where the driver feels like their life will be in danger? How do we price the risk then? And that says nothing about the possible mismatch of perception between the seller and the customer.
How about if a grocery store sells goods at a higher price to customers in lower income areas because they notice that it lowers the number of high income area customers to the point they make less profit? Is it right for that store to raise the price for identifiably lower income area customer to make up for the lost profit?
> Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust
Your statement includes things like loyalty programs and memberships. Presenting these credentials at checkout means customers are willingly giving the company "prior knowledge about them" (that they've shopped at the store before and how much they're willing to spend) unrelated to the *specific* food or service they're purchasing. Should these practices be allowed?
The point of this reply isn't to say what should or shouldn't be allowed, it's to show that I believe the issue is more nuanced than you can account for in your statement of what constitutes unjust business practices.
Why is it unjust? It’s absolutely the store or individual’s choice to charge what they want to who they want, assuming that they aren’t discriminating against a protected class.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
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 find this comment hard to square with another of yours in the thread:
> ... If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
In my own head, this was the the most far-fetched piece of my own comment!
Just for clarification: Does this affect intraday price changes, and how much if this is AI vs. 'standard database operations'?
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
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.
If you look at the actual text of the bill, it’s much more expansive than simply profiling people. It defines dynamic pricing as, “THE PRACTICE OF VARYING THE PRICES OF CONSUMER GOODS OR SERVICES WITHIN A BUSINESS DAY BASED ON DEMAND OR OTHER FACTORS, INCLUDING THROUGH THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR MODELS THAT RETRAIN OR RECALIBRATE BASED ON RECEIVED INFORMATION IN NEAR REAL–TIME.”[1]
This absolutely would ban changing the price in the middle of the day in response to changes in temperature, as the parent comment suggested.
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
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.
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
Which supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
Maybe because it is not my first language, but I don't mean they are doing, I am saying they can do it and it is not that difficult.
Pharmacies in my home country are notorious for making personalised prices. Some big brand grocery stores here have "fiddly" cards and face tracking.
They can easily manipulate prices to make you register yourself and then make discount based on some personalisation metric.
We are all used to it though Amzn and others. We just don't realise that all that is needed for it to get to your basket is that one of them to do it and others to follow.
We have seen many recent examples of companies applying abusive corporate practices and instead of capitalising on it, the competitors just follow with some excuse...
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
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.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
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.
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.
I don't see why consumers wouldn't just pick the stores that have better prices for them. Why would they know/care/need to know what the prices are doing for other people?
The issue is that consumers who can pick better stores will get better prices, while those that can't will get gouged. Imagine someone who works multiple jobs and only has time to shop at the grocery store closest to them.
The algorithmically-driven store will start by randomly showing them some random prices and seeing how they respond. If they are willing to accept high prices, the store will keep charging them more. If they leave the store and go somewhere else, the store will revert to lower prices. The store will discriminate against people who won't comparison shop for whatever reason (busy, limited access to transport, rich enough that they don't care, etc.)
However, the store's extra margins won't lead to lower prices for other consumers, even in a fully competitive market. Raising prices for consumers who won't comparison shop will do nothing to change the marginal cost of serving a consumer who does, so this won't change the competitive dynamics for those consumers and they won't see lower prices.
> In a competitive environment (which grocery stores are), this excess capital gets reinvested into beating the competition.
That's not true though. Excess capital does not necessarily get reinvested in an efficient market. If that were the case, companies in relatively efficient markets would spend a very small portion of their free cash flow on dividends and share buybacks, which is not the case.
Of $7.2B free cash flow in 2025 they spent $3.9B on capital expenditures and about $3.6B on dividends and buybacks (those numbers don't add up because of things like loans, sale of assets, and stock issuance).
Additionally, even if companies in competitive markets did reinvest all their excess profits from personalized pricing, the benefits would only accrue to consumers that the algorithm thinks are price-sensitive.
You can't see you mean? Consumers pick things that are reasonably convenient, achievable and known to them. These things are all subject to exploitative tactics by grocery stores.
There's also price-fixing, which famously occurred in Canada recently.
Not to mention cornering a market like Walmart would and removing consumer choice entirely.
You were not asking about dynamic pricing. You were asking why you weren't able to see the reason that consumers don't always find & choose the cheapest option. The person you were responding to was explaining the unethical realities of food retailers. There's no reason why these would disappear with dynamic pricing.
No, the entire conversation is about a change toward dynamic pricing. My comment about pricing is that dynamic pricing doesn't change the competitive dynamic between retailers. You are chiming in and saying "well there are other competitive/noncompetitive dynamics at play," which I agree with and never disputed and am not talking about.
The grocery market is. Margins sit at 1-2%, there is absolutely no reason to believe dynamic pricing would change that. Grocery stores are one place where free markets have created incredible consumer surplus because competition is high.
> 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.
The point of personalized pricing, which is what this bill addresses, is to identify consumers who won't shop around and give them higher prices.
You can't compete that away because the consumers being hurt aren't sensitive to competition (for example, they don't have a car and therefor can't get to a different grocery store). It's an inherently anti-competitive practice.
I agree that temporal dynamic pricing might be good in some circumstances, but this bill doesn't ban it.
Right, anti-competitive practices are where a business tries to limit competition. And dynamic pricing is anti-competitive because businesses are essentially algorithmically identifying customers whose business they don't need to compete for, and then charging them non-competitive prices.
> 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).
The point of pricing water to that level is that it would induce other people who have access to bottled water to bring it to that market, as is desirable
No, the point is to selfishly profit-maximise. I'm not trying to be difficult in saying that. The thing you describe is not the intent, it's the hypothetical effect. It may or may not do that (I don't think it typically does, take toilet paper during COVID for example).
Yes, the point for the individual setting that price is to selfishly profit-maximize. The point for us accepting a system that does this is because it signals to other water-bottle-holders that there is a dire need nearby and pays them to meet that need.
I don't think the example of a meme-driven pseudo-shortage of a paper good during a once in a lifetime global pandemic (causing both supply and demand shocks and significant information problems) is a very good point.
You assume that other people can simply bring bottled water to market & compete with discoverability and access to customers with established players?
Or is your point that all people in a market with leaded water should be paying $100 for pure water because it is inherently worth that much per the market.
No, I assume that if anyone can bring bottled water to market, they should have a strong incentive to do so whenever there is a strong need for more of it.
But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers. As well, these things are often blocked to newcomers because of existing deals with big players.
> But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers.
I didn't say everybody. I said anybody who can.
What you describe is exactly why it's important to have an incentive for the people who do have those resources to employ them towards getting bottled water to this lead-poisoned region...
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.
>You believe that poor people don't 'pay taxes', even though all of their money and excess labor value is definitionally recirculated into the economy or back to the government?
Yes, about 31% of returns in 2022 were for people who didn't pay federal income tax. By a massive, overwhelming majority, they are lower-income levels, who also receive the most direct cash and cash-like benefits from the government.
>You believe in the world's most expensive healthcare, the world's most expensive universities(/hedge funds), corrupt spending on corporations, wars on behalf of the empire, and our vassal states, and 'lavish' benefits for only corporations and white people (as has been the case since we invented whiteness)?
Surely you realize healthcare and university expense is, in part, driven by all the free money the government pumps into the system, right? How successful would universities be at charging $80K a semester if not for federally subsidized student loans? I'm arguing against all the things you just listed - you seem to be confused.
>Am I correctly understanding that this status quo is your preference?
The status quo for the last 20 years is a bad thing. Our ballooning debt, as a direct result of profligate spending on all the things I listed, is a problem. Again, you seem to be very confused about my position.
>I'm also curious which benefit is specifically 'lavish'. The only social programs I'd describe as such are the programs that create billionaires.
What social program do you think creates billionaires? Even being charitable to your position, Walmart's revenue is about 4% driven by foodstamps. Even big bad Walmart isn't successful because of social programs.
As for lavish:
"The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level.
A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs."
>Or do you just think that politicians shouldn't talk about rent, fuel, and food prices?
Considering politicians from both sides have repeatedly made each of these issues worse through things like rent-control and zoning restrictions or environmental restrictions and the Iran war, yes, I do think politicians should just be quiet and do less: they'd cause less damage.
>Or is your contention that the working poor just stupid for believing anything will ever get better in our two party system?
Basically any average citizen is silly for thinking their vote has an impact. Per "Testing Theories of American Politics", the preferences of the average citizen have a "near-zero, statistically non-significant impact" on public policy when the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are taken into account.
I don't know how to explain in clearer terms that, for the lowest quintile of the population, who has zero or negative net wealth. They have given every dollar they have to someone else. Be it the government or a private corporation, all their dollars act as stimulus or savings for those with more. All their excess labor value, generated from their work, also goes to other people, predominantly the wealthy.
You are annoyed they don't pay income taxes, but where are the accolades for their generosity?
> What social program do you think creates billionaires?
Elon Musk would not be a hundred billionaire without government contracts and vast government subsidies. Likewise for Ellison and Palantir and whoever else gets to hoover up our defense spending. So too for any entity that receives the myriad benefits of 'public private partnership' in domains that used to be exclusively government run. Deloitte makes bank on 'administering' public programs. The Multi-billion dollar retail Tax prep exists entirely because the government is bribed not to compete. Private prisons/concentration camps are 'social programs' that produces billions in private wealth. etc. etc.. etc...
> Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128.
> It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits.
... A person who make this little would not pay income taxes, so these credits cannot be realized.
> Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
TANF is temporary
All of these programs are difficult to retain access to. I've never met anybody among the working poor able to realize even half of these meagre benefits.
A random family in NYC would pay, on average, $20,439 annually, just on child care, per child, thus, this hypothetical single parent is contributing at least $40k in labor to produce future workers. It's not unreasonable to give them compensation for this thankless task.
As another point of comparison, Norway spends 18k per year for every kindergartener in their nation regardless of the parent's income. This is what is known as, under capitalism, an investment with a 50 year compounding return.
Starving, homeless children produce negative externalities if they are not cared for, so the return on the investment is even more potent in this case.
All this said, you've asserted that 53k, by itself, is 'lavish'. But you are speaking to someone who regularly makes that much money in between blinks on a half-decent day in the market, so I'm not really convinced that it is.
> Basically any average citizen is silly for thinking their vote has an impact. Per "Testing Theories of American Politics", the preferences of the average citizen have a "near-zero, statistically non-significant impact" on public policy when the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are taken into account.
This is why organized, sustained political action is required above and beyond elections. So that, in aggregate, these near-zeros can create change.
It's not an invitation to check out and advocate for centrist reactionary nihilistic libertarianism, which is what I have to assume your true position is.
>... All their excess labor value, generated from their work, also goes to other people, predominantly the wealthy.
You are annoyed they don't pay income taxes, but where are the accolades for their generosity?
70% of the people in the lowest quintile have 0 adults working fulltime, and therefore produce effectively 0 labor value. They don't contribute, they take. Would you be OK with requiring a work, education, volunteer, or caretaking requirement for any welfare programs; to ensure that these people are actually working for society?
>Elon Musk would not be a hundred billionaire without government contracts and vast government subsidies. Likewise for Ellison and Palantir and whoever else gets to hoover up our defense spending. So too for any entity that receives the myriad benefits of 'public private partnership' in domains that used to be exclusively government run. Deloitte makes bank on 'administering' public programs. The Multi-billion dollar retail Tax prep exists entirely because the government is bribed not to compete. Private prisons/concentration camps are 'social programs' that produces billions in private wealth. etc. etc.. etc...
None of those are social programs: they required the person or company to "work" by providing a service or good that benefits people, rather than get a handout. There's a debate over the government mismanaging and misallocating the budget, but Lockheed selling a F-35 or Ellison providing compute to the government is not welfare.
> Government welfare: [The low income, underemployed family] would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits.
>>... A person who make this little would not pay income taxes, so these credits cannot be realized.
You do know what a refundable tax credit means, right? "A refundable tax credit is a credit you can get as a refund even if you don't owe any tax. - IRS"
>All of these programs are difficult to retain access to. I've never met anybody among the working poor able to realize even half of these meagre benefits.
All these programs exist and receive billions of dollars at both the state and federal level. If people aren't receiving those dollars, all the more reason to abolish the program and stop the hemorrhage of cash.
>A random family in NYC would pay, on average, $20,439 annually, just on child care, per child, thus, this hypothetical single parent is contributing at least $40k in labor to produce future workers. It's not unreasonable to give them compensation for this thankless task.
NYC is 200% more expensive higher than the national average for COL and 400% higher when counting housing. It's a terrible place to try and raise a family on a low income. NYC's budget deficit varies, but is in the billions. Subsidizing a future barista or UberEats driver to the tune of $100K or more in childcare across 5 years is ludicrous, especially when you consider that again, about 40% of people pay 0 federal taxes. Stats aren't readily available for NYC taxpayers by income, but I can guarantee that NYC would literally lose money on this "investment" at a population level.
> As another point of comparison, Norway spends 18k per year for every kindergartener in their nation regardless of the parent's income. This is what is known as, under capitalism, an investment with a 50 year compounding return.
And the US spends $18,614 per public school pupil. Again, we're already spending the money but not getting the return (see: PISA scores, graduation rates, educational outcomes).
I completely agree that ROI should be considered when making government decisions. With that in mind, let's focus on reducing low ROI migration and illegal immigration. "Immigrants without a college education and all those who immigrate to the U.S. after age 55 are universally a net fiscal burden by up to $400,000... The average newly arrived immigrant who entered the country illegally is expected to have a net fiscal burden of about $130,000 in adjusted terms, so preventing future unlawful immigration is important...Using these figures, every refugee in FY 2022 is expected to increase the federal budget deficit of the U.S. by nearly $152,000 over his lifetime".
>Starving, homeless children produce negative externalities if they are not cared for, so the return on the investment is even more potent in this case.
The US already has SNAP, WIC, TANF, Section 8, and more. Again, these children aren't starving/homeless because we aren't paying for them, but because their parents are misallocating the money we give them.
>All this said, you've asserted that 53k, by itself, is 'lavish'. But you are speaking to someone who regularly makes that much money in between blinks on a half-decent day in the market, so I'm not really convinced that it is.
Now multiply that $53K across the population, and you'll see a major contributor to the $1.9 trillion deficit.
> This is why organized, sustained political action is required above and beyond elections. So that, in aggregate, these near-zeros can create change. It's not an invitation to check out and advocate for centrist reactionary nihilistic libertarianism, which is what I have to assume your true position is.
What action do you want to advocate for? More taxes, more wasteful spending, more people not contributing to society but just taking? Before you advocate for policy, learning some tax basics like what a refundable tax credit is would go a long way.
I think that opaque pricing is bad in that it creates a feeling of helplessness in the customer, is annoying and after every deal it makes you feel like you have been ripped off. Like the - call us to get a quote on some sites instead of direct pricing.
To a lesser extent it is the same with loyalty programs - my grocery stores often discount items to 50% and on my receipt it there is usually something like - you saved 20 Euro - which could be 20 to 30% of the bill. A lesser mind than the average consumer's may suspect that they keep all the prices permanently inflated by 20 to 30% and if some schmuck dare to buy their favorite cheese when not discounted - it is on them.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines
the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
> 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.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
It’s likely just posturing for political support. No nation-wide law that I’m aware of exists in the US. In my state, the lowest advertised or displayed price is the honored price. They have to update the shelf price before the register’s. Any difference gets a refund which unfortunately is not automatic. Requires vigilance by the consumer but it would prevent this type of AI pricing.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
The problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. 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. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
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.
> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
use a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time).
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
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
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
What is a "membership discount" (assuming you don't mean coupons) in the context of a grocery store? Can you give an example of a major grocery store that has one?
For what it's worth,
> The bill clarifies that certain practices, such as promotional pricing, loyalty programs, or price differences based on objective costs like shipping, are not considered prohibited dynamic pricing.
Harris Teeter is an example of a large chain that has promotions (not coupons) that are applied at checkout only if you have your VIC card (their free membership program). There’s a lot of BOGO, a few dollars off etc offers that are tagged to the price label throughout the store.
I used to shop at HT at the last place I lived. It was always crazy seeing all of those discounts pop up. I don't know if I was actually saving money over the other stores nearby but it certainly felt like it. Honestly, I like shopping at Lidl now. My grocery bill always feels much cheaper. I don't get much savings using my phone number, I think they want you to clip coupons on the app but I still walk out paying less than I would elsewhere. A large portion of the stuff at Lidl are not major brands, I suspect they are the companies that produce white label products for store brands.
Got it, thank you for the example. That seems to be still allowed by the bill.
The behavior targeted here seems to be more like "Our data indicates this person is poor and desperate, let's charge them more for rice and beans than we charge other people, since that's most of what they'll buy. We've calculated that we can charge up to $X to exhaust their budget/foodstamps and they'll still buy."
Sure, I was asking about membership discounts (e.g. people who shop at this store and are "members" get 10% off everything compared to "non-members"), vs loyalty programs with individual product electronic coupons/promotions, which aren't covered by this bill.
Typical European loyalty programs offer spend-based ‘points’ accumulation which can be spent as a discount later. Additional offers on top of that like ‘bonus points on product X’ or personalized offers based on purchase history add to the degree of variation in how much individual customers end up spending.
If a store exists that has a "membership discount" (e.g. members get 10% off their purchase), like maybe GNC does, it seems that would be allowed, too.
No, not at all, not even close to what is being discussed here. You should probably do a LOT more research to understand what kind of pricing they are talking about here, and what AI is. None of these things are apparently things you are remotely aware of at all in any way for you to suggest it's merely "if-statement."
No, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
In most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
Regarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
> What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation?
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
Because aggregate statistics completely fail to recognise the massive philosophical differences in the system. It is like saying someone who buys Ferrari is getting ripped off because they aren't choosing to ride a bike.
The US pays more because it provides significantly greater coverage outside of aggregate statistics. All of the innovation in rare diseases is because of the US, in public healthcare systems some diseases are simply not treated because it isn't regarded as economic to do so. How do you even quantify that difference? It is like making a GDP comparison between 1800 and today, what price would someone in 1800 not to die of TB? Life expectancy of 20 years old in many countries? Anyone who compares the two things in terms of cost is a lunatic.
In short though, it is not obvious that a high-cost healthcare system is worse. The US system is inefficient, almost all of this relates to their decision not to use universal healthcare which leads to problems pricing insurance. However, this is not related to the system, there are many countries in Europe and worldwide which have effective private healthcare systems.
Not saying a high cost system is worse rather that seeing the benefits in data isn't so easy. Not clear what the "right" costs for a system should be, I reckon.
As to drug discovery etc.: I think, not easy to say how the world would look like if the US weren't offering the opportunities. What would be new equilibrium RoIs needed if the world were quite different (and, yes, I am aware of studies there).
> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
It's "bigger" in the sense it spends more money per capita. Something very American exceptionalist about the OP suggesting that this is somehow more relevant than it covering fewer people and treatments.
The point is that Europeans seem to believe that the US does not have a public healthcare system, it does.
I am not sure what your point is about covering fewer people either. The point of public healthcare systems is that there are redistributive, correct? The reason the US public healthcare system does not cover everyone is because there are people who can pay for their own healthcare...which is the same in Europe. I live in Europe, in a system with "free healthcare", I pay $100/month for private healthcare because queues for most things are multiple years long AND I pay $1-1.5k/month for other people to use the public healthcare system I can't use.
But actually Europeans merely correctly believe that the US is unique in how many of its citizens it allows to die from preventable deaths due to them not being able to afford healthcare whilst technically not being poor enough to meet the state aid criteria either. I am not sure you are in a position to lecture about European ignorance when you're implying everyone in the US who is ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid can afford a comprehensive insurance plan.
The irony is in the US rather than paying a low amount on private healthcare so that you could potentially beat the queue on relatively low cost state healthcare, you would be paying a much higher rate for private healthcare with more copays and coverage exemptions and also contributing a higher portion of your taxes to a publicly funded insurance program you wouldn't be able to access at all when you lost your job or your insurer denied treatment.
> life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
>So, are American just inherently less disciplined that Europeans?
I never said anything like that but you could be right on that. A lot of those lifestyle issues are creeping in other highly urbanized rich western countries. Especially mental illnesses due to loneliness, lack of family unit, poor economic outlook, etc
>I find this explanation very unsatisfying.
Then come up with a better one and share it.
If you want to compare the success of health systems you need to compare just the health systems between them alone, not the life expectancy with is a cumulus of several other factors beyond the public + privately managed health systems, such as lifestyles, agriculture, diet, weather, genetics, income, exercise, pollution, etc.
For example, compare waiting times for MRIs, treatments, operations, procedures, post-op infection rates, etc then compare the life expectancy of those who undergo those procedures/treatments, etc.
>You have to look at systems to understand what is actually happening.
Healthcare is an inelastic market, people are willing to pay anything to get it. Private insurance companies have grown into a kind of cartel and are able to jack up prices at will, going as high as customers are able to pay. They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins. These companies are so powerful, and officials are so easily corrupted, that they are able to get their way with legislation every time.
All of this combines into a huge vicious cycle that is able to extract more and more wealth for worse and worse results.
Americans used to live longer than Europeans, you know? Now it's the opposite. Certainly, food in America is worse and people drive more instead of walking. But then again, the State isn't incentivized to keep its citizenry healthy, since it doesn't pay for healthcare. To me, this is part of a package deal, there's no sense in trying to decorrelate public health from healthcare systems.
>Americans used to live longer than Europeans, you know?
When, in WW2?
>They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins.
I've experience both systems. It's worse (for me) with European state-run healthcare I am right now, where they are even more disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, except not to increase margins but because the system is constantly broke, so the treatments are always long-wait and last-gen compared to the cutting edge fast-track you get in the US, if you're insured, or you pay through the nose for it, or your insurance does if you work for a decent company.
So that doesn't explain why Americans live less despite being able to get cutting edge care faster. You know, maybe a diet of processed food and sedentary lifestyle can't be undone by a faster MRI/surgery appointment with cutting edge equipment.
> So that doesn't explain why Americans live less despite being able to get cutting edge care faster.
Yes it does. Average lifespan in an average. Americans have worse access to healthcare on average than Europeans, hence why they die sooner on average. European systems may be worse for you specifically, because you are wealthy enough to get "fast-tracked" in the US. But America's just a worse system overall.
And you're wrong about incentives for state-provided healthcare. A competent government would recognize that healthy citizens are more productive and bring in more tax revenue. Too bad we're currently run by reactionary morons, but that can always change in the future.
> maybe a diet of processed food and sedentary lifestyle can't be undone by a faster MRI/surgery appointment with cutting edge equipment.
I seriously doubt that people are that much healthier in the EU, enough to explain away all the difference in life expectancy, when Americans have provably worse access to healthcare. Around 7.3% of American adults couldn't get access to necessary healthcare for cost reasons in 2024 [0].
Life expectancy for a country of 300m compared with a subsection of Europe that is most wealthy...seems like a fairly disingenuous comparison.
Are you one of those people that believes most American schools are shooting ranges too?
All of the problems in the US are concentrated in subsections of the population (just as in Europe). America is a wealthy country that has a mix of south American and African problems attached to it. There is no healthcare system that is going to be able to fix this. Europe has the same problem, the difference is that share of the population was typically much smaller than the US.
I didn't say anything about the cost of healthcare on average. The US already has a public healthcare system, it doesn't work well expecting that to magically improve is not smart (again, particularly when you have evidence from other countries, even in magic Europe-land, that private healthcare can work effectively).
"The US already has a public healthcare system, it doesn't work well "
Medicare works pretty well and the VA works pretty well despite all the negative propaganda. Both are different systems but both have government regulations on pricing.
People are pretending that in the private US health care system everybody gets stellar treatment without waiting times. That is simply not true. When I compare the waiting times my family in Germany has vs how much friends in the US are waiting, I don't see much difference. US quality doesn't seem better either. The main difference seems to be that in the US people are constantly strategizing whether they want to risk paying a month's salary for taking an ambulance or going bankrupt when they have a serious illness. Whereas in Germany they go to the doctor when they need to.
Yes, you can have super shiny new treatments in the US if you can pay but I prefer a system that first covers the most common problems in an affordable way.
> Life expectancy for a country of 300m compared with a subsection of Europe that is most wealthy...seems like a fairly disingenuous comparison.
Always the same weird "You don't understand, America is really big" argument. GDP per capita is higher there than in anywhere in western Europe. Why is your healthcare system delivering worse results for much higher price? It's a simple question, and the answer is equally simple: private insurance acts as an useless and bloated middleman whose incentives are opposite to providing quality healthcare to its customers. They want to be paid the most in exchange for the least service. Couple that to a bought political class and you've got the least efficient healthcare system in the developed world.
> Are you one of those people that believes most American schools are shooting ranges too?
Strawman. I don't.
> America is a wealthy country that has a mix of south American and African problems attached to it.
???
If you mean to say that America is providing for the world, that's an insane position to hold. The USA are extracting much more wealth from these places than they are injecting.
They should leave dynamic pricing. The rich could then hire poor people to do their shopping. Everybody wins. This is semi sarcastic. In chasing absolute maximum returns they open themselves for eventual gaming of the system.
AI is not a technology. It's a (shitty) political artefact of control, to bring people to pay more, own less, depend on a few capitalist owners for their livelihoods.
If by this you mean that standard supply-demand economics can't model price discrimination, which is what's going on here, that's not correct. See, for example, Chapter 10 of David Friedman's Price Theory, where he models price discrimination using supply and demand curves just fine. In terms of this kind of analysis, price discrimination is a way for sellers to try to transfer as much as possible of what would otherwise be consumer surplus, to themselves.
The buyer in a grocery store can't negotiate; the store just sets the price and the buyer's only choice is to take it or leave it. Under the conditions described, the product is still worth it to the buyer who the store is charging the higher price (the one the store knows has more income and so can afford to pay more), at the higher price--there's just less consumer surplus. So the buyer still buys the product. But there's no negotiation anywhere; there's no opportunity for it.
The store manager has a lot of flexibility, and some of the staff are also empowered to take care of things.
If you feel you are being overcharged, see the manager. If you're nice to them, you can negotiate. Remind him how many years you've been a loyal customer. Being polite and friendly works, being a jerk does not.
The ultimate negotiating tactic is to explain your position politely to the store manager, and walk out.
I remember buying a car from a dealer. The dealer wouldn't agree to my price. He was adamant about it. So I got up, left, got in my car, started the engine, and backed out. The dealer came running out of the showroom and said he'd match my price.
Businessmen will always tell you that prices aren't negotiable. That is a tactic for rubes.
All of this is very nice--and irrelevant to the point under discussion.
Under the scenario that the Maryland law is outlawing, the richer customer who is being charged the higher price by the grocery store still finds the product to be worth it to them at the higher price. And since their time has value, and they're just grocery shopping, and they're rich and not trying to pinch pennies, they'll just buy the thing at the price the store is asking. There will be less consumer surplus for them, as I said, than there would be if the store were charging them the same price as the average middle class person--but it's highly doubtful that it will be worth their time to try to extract that extra consumer surplus from the store. That's why stores want to price discriminate in the first place--because they know the richer customers won't bother trying to haggle over price.
From what the article says, it looks to be political pressure about protecting privacy and "consumer rights". Whether the law actually does what the politicians say it's for, is a different question.
This discussion is perverse. Negotiations require leverage, which the average grocery buyer in the USA does not have. As a society we don't benefit from min-maxing absolutely every opportunity.
The PX is subsidized by the taxpayers, and it's a benefit provided to members of the military and their families. A military base is a socialist paradise, which only works because taxpayers pay for it.
My dad grew up a socialist. He was cured of that affliction after living on military bases for years. For example, the economy on a base on the surface looks like a money based economy. But it isn't. The actual economy is based on rank and a currency of mutual favors. For example, the guy who allocates base housing to you obliges you to return a favor if you get better quarters.
Having a higher rank means you can grant more favors, and so get more favors in return.
The USSR economy ran like that, too, on a massive scale.
P.S. The USSR's actual prices on things included the time spent waiting in line. People would pay others to wait in line for them. Talk about inefficiency!
Personal favors do play a role in the private economy, but money is still the dominant currency. Under socialism, the dominant currency is favors. Favors are a form of barter, and barter economies are inefficient. I can explain why if you like.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
That has always happened. If you go to a flea market, do you think the seller isn't going to bump up the price if you look prosperous or desperate? Do you think the roof replacement company isn't going to make a bid based on how wealthy or poor your neighborhood looks? Or you need a new water heater? Do you think grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods charge more?
We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no".
BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?
At the flea market you can haggle. Are you saying we should all have to haggle with the harried checkout person over the price of milk ever time we shop? Or everything is self checkout and you don't haggle but then choose whether you accept the price or not?
As with many things in technology, it's not about the raw concept, it's about the automation of it and inability to appeal to a human. Haggling face to face is human. Having a bot decide what you are paying (take it or leave it) is asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo.
I've never encountered or heard of a grocery store that didn't mark the prices on the shelves.
> asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo
You have the power to say "no". The only transactions you are forced into are the ones dealing with the government or the mob.
> inability to appeal to a human
I was stonewalled by a gigantic corporation the other day over a substantial sum of money. I googled the name and address of the CEO, and sent him a hand written polite letter. My issue was promptly resolved.
I know the CEO didn't read the letter. But he has staff that does, and hand writing a letter will get their attention, as well as reminding them that I was a loyal customer.
This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination. It's forbidding sellers from transferring consumer surplus to themselves by charging a higher price to customers that would be willing to pay a higher price for the same item. But the item is still available to buyers that wouldn't want to pay the higher price--at the lower price. The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them. Whether they will try to find other ways of increasing their profit over what they get when every customer pays the price that's equal to their marginal cost, is a different question.
> This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination.
I.e. the government is regulating prices, yet another attempt going on for 4,000 years of trying and failing to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
> The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them.
Allow me to explain how prices are set:
Consider an appliance store. They want to sell refrigerators. What do they do? They have 3 refrigerator lines - the stripper, the midline, and the lux. The purpose of the stripper is that is what they advertise, to bring customers into the store. The purpose of the midrange is to upsell those who come for the stripper, as they think the extra features are worth it. The lux is sold to the wealthy customers who just want to buy the best. (Not having a lux is means the retailer is throwing easy money away.)
The moneymaker is the midrange.
You'll see the same thing in the grocery store. The store advertises the price of milk, which is likely at below cost (called a "loss leader"). People come to buy the milk, which is always on the back wall of the store. The customer has to pass by all kinds of things to get to the milk, and they'll buy it. The most overpriced stuff will be next to the checkout line.
Cheeses come in cheap, midrange, and lux, too.
There's been an extensive amount of research on exactly how to set up the store to maximize profits, which is necessary as grocery stores have razor thin margins.
BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
The government is regulating one particular thing that many sellers try to do (price discrimination). But it is not preventing sellers from adjusting their prices based on supply and demand. The seller can still set price equal to marginal cost--i.e., where the supply and demand curves cross--to maximize profit. They just can't extract further profit by charging richer customers more than marginal cost to transfer the consumer surplus to themselves.
> Allow me to explain how prices are set
Spare me your patronizing. I already referred to a textbook on price theory elsewhere in the thread. I know how it works. That should be evident from what I posted above and earlier in the thread.
None of what you describe is price discrimination--nor is any of it outlawed by the law under discussion here. You are describing marketing strategies involving different products--different levels of quality. Of course sellers do those things all the time, and they can continue to do it under this law.
What the law under discussion here outlaws is charging different customers different prices for the same product--for example, the appliance store you describe charging the rich person a higher price for the same refrigerator--say the midline--than the average middle class person. It says nothing whatever about the rich person paying more for a better refrigerator--the lux--than the average middle class person pays for the midline.
As you can negotiate prices at an appliance dealership, obviously people pay different prices for the same thing. The prices at the grocery store change daily, obviously people are paying different prices for the same thing. The guy you sit next to on an airplane paid a different price than you did. The pump price at the gas station can change hourly.
> They just can't extract further profit by charging richer customers more than marginal cost to transfer the consumer surplus to themselves.
The demand curve is different for every customer.
It is fraudulent to charge more than the posted price. But absent that, it's a negotiated price.
BTW, do you also feel it is unfair if a store charges a person less if the store realizes the person is a bit needy?
Just for fun, watch the movie "Back To School" starring Rodney Dangerfield. The funniest bit in it is when Dangerfield (a real estate developer) lectures the business professor on how business really works.
I've run multiple businesses. It's pretty clear that I did not have any power over the customers. I could not just raise prices and "extract" more profit, much as I would have liked to. It's hard to make money running a business. Businesses go bust all the time. I wouldn't pay too much attention to a business professor who had never run a business.
> The demand curve is different for every customer.
No, the price the customer is willing to pay for a given product is different for every customer. But the demand curve is just the aggregate of all that--how many customers are willing to pay a given price for the product, as a function of the price. There are different demand curves for different products, but the notion that there is a different demand curve for every customer for a single product makes no sense.
> BTW, do you also feel it is unfair if a store charges a person less if the store realizes the person is a bit needy?
I've said nothing whatever about whether or not I agree with the Maryland law under discussion here. I'm just trying to be clear about what the law does and doesn't do.
> I could not just raise prices and "extract" more profit
You can't raise prices for all customers and expect more profit, of course.
But if you can raise prices only for those customers who are willing to pay higher prices, i.e., if you can price discriminate, then yes, you can extract more profit by doing that--as I've said multiple times now, you're transferring what would otherwise be consumer surplus to yourself. And if the cost to you of getting the extra information you need to price discriminate is less than the consumer surplus you're able to extract by doing so, then it's profitable for you to do it if you can.
Doing what I've just described is what the law under discussion here outlaws.
> BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
Many stores are rolling out electronic price tags on the shelves, which can be rapidly updated wirelessly [1]. They could probably do the price adjustment there. I'd assume they wouldn't want to make it too blatant, which would be a challenge.
Actually, restaurants that cater to the very rich often don't have any prices on the menu, on the theory that if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it.
This actually seems like a pretty uniting issue. I haven't seen many politicians of any party openly come out in favor of the sort of price discrimination banned by this bill.
Came to say the same thing. Though calling it 'price discrimination' will bring out the MAGAs who will reflexively conclude that banning it must be woke/DEI and then demand to have it everywhere. Better to call it 'diverse pricing' to get the opposite reaction.
"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.
FWIW, Trump's FTC dropped a price discrimination lawsuit against Pepsi after Pepsi donated $500k to Trump's inauguration. The suit was brought up under Biden's administration.
Republican politicians do support price discrimination. It fits in with their pro big business, anti consumer policies. To recognize this and then quibble over "the sort" or how "openly" they support it, is disingenuous.
If only we could be free from this virus! When I encounter a fellow grocery store price gouger, I am not filled with the sense of fraternity and compassion I should. Instead, I have been manipulated into feeling like they're my enemy!
This is coming off as something I would see in r/iamverysmart. I only see this coming from people that self-declared "independents" who try to play the "both sides" card and won't ever stand for anything. Which really just says everything you need to know. (If this isn't you, don't worry! The comment just comes across as an indicator.)
That you would bring this up here is odd. This topic is hardly deeply divisive, nor is it a new issue. That you think so is more a case of you not reading the news.
The topic of AI surveillance pricing is almost exclusively covered by left-leaning media sources according to ground news and party affiliation largely predicted the vote with no 100% of voting Democratic legislators for and 88% of voting republicans against it.
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
Sure but they weren't trying to price per category, they were trying to grab as much of the area under the demand curve as possible. Given what was possible, that's all they could do.
There is a market solution to this - don't shop at places which do it. If I go to the supermarket and they jack up the price of bread because I'm in a rush and 40 something wearing a suit I'm likely to spew venom, pay that one time, and never, ever come back.
Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
Kroger and the others operate razor thin margins. They offer programs for low income consumers, support local and national charities, do second chance hiring and specifically create unique roles for people with disabilities. They aren’t required to do ANY of those things in most places that they operate.
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
https://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com...
Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
An average store carries around 20,000 SKUs, so I understand that they’re looking for easier solutions to price updates, especially after having relatively high inflation after a couple of decades.
However, they’re already making it impossible for shoppers to track prices, and we all know soon (left to their own devices) they’re going to switch to individual pricing.
I’m surprised that the pricing issue is not being discussed in the context of online shopping already, with home deliveries on the rise.
I have zero sympathy for them. My local Safeway, despite being able to upgrade to e-Ink price tags with all this is still absolutely intended to make it impossible for consumers. Example, for the same brand of paper towel, in different sizes, the price comparison for one size is $/sheet, another, $/sqft, and another, $/roll.
They have the solutions, they just know that the more solutions are in play, the less (in theory) they'll be able to get away with shit like this.
In my country prices are often wrong because supermarkets are run by a small team of literal teenagers (one of the downsides of having decent minimum wages is that nobody wants to hire anyone if they somehow can avoid it).
The true minimum wage is zero.
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.
Surveillance pricing should be outright banned IMHO, but Cory Doctorow had an article earlier this week explaining all the ways this particular ban is broken [1].
It was probably broken by design, allowing the politicians to brag about how they're doing something, while the lobbyists managed to carve out such large loopholes for themselves that it will in likelihood never be a real deterrent.
For example: surveillance pricing is allowed if users opt-in so consider how many times you've clicked "I agree" on websites recently to get past some legalese wall of text blocking you from the content.
Another thing is you can't sue a grocery store, but you can petition the AG to sue them, which they will do only if they feel like it.
Not to mention that it applies only to grocery stores, not hotels and airlines and other industries which are inclined to do surveillance pricing
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
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.
The way McDonald's does this that they essentially offer discounts that you can only get by using the mobile app, and the mobile app can dynamically price your cart however they wish. All they (or any other business) has to do is to increase their non-mobile prices to squeeze out non-identifiable shopping.
> the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item.
Sure it can, cameras and facial recognition.
Identify a person when they enter the store. Track them with overhead cameras as they move throughout the store. Set the price for the individual when they get to checkout. It barely requires any extra infrastructure in most stores.
You don't need a unique barcode per item, you simply need to be able to identify the person purchasing the item at checkout.
Barcodes today don't contain price information (except for meat AFAIK. But then you'd mostly just need to change it to be weight instead of price).
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
If we're including promotions or membership discounts, then coupons fit this definition of price discrimination. And those have existed since the 90s at least.
The problems show up when different people don't have access to the same coupons published by the store. Most coupons are fine.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
In the UK, it's common for supermarkets to have loyalty cards (e.g. Tesco Clubcard) and then they display prices along with the price for using a loyalty card. Then, they just apply the discount (which varies according to the product) when you swipe your card before paying.
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.
I think viewing it at as a discount is framing it wrong. It’s more a fee for not using the app, and if you use the app you’ll get charged the highest price McDonald’s has decided you will pay.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
> Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds
Today's, yes, but that's really not a technology limit. EInk displays have much faster refresh rates. The main limitation is the communication, but that's a solvable problem with a smart enough networking mesh.
> multiple people can view a product simultaneously
You track the people's position. If multiple people are crowded around the same product then you can pick a price for both customers. Might not work well for crowded stores, but in that case you probably can just maximize the prices anyways as a lot of people are currently shopping.
> This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product.
No, you just need 1 customer ID on entrance to the store. Everything else can be done by tracking their position with overhead cameras. You don't need to put a camera on every product.
> 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.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
> 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.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-...
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.
The article says loyalty programs and https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/H... makes no mention of this store restriction. Just retailer.
It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I expect the outcome of this to be prices raised for everyone and then loyalty discounts per group.
> 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."
Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
> Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
Obviously acceptable. But I'm talking about two people placing an order for the same ticket, same airline, same rewards program and getting different prices because the airline knows something about their private life. For example, maybe the airline has gotten information that one person is going to a funeral and thus are more willing to pay a higher price.
Everything about this encourages corporate espionage on private citizens which I'm opposed to. I'd rather not have google calendar secretly sharing my entries with delta so they can in turn determine what ticket price I might be willing to pay.
There's also not market fundamentals which can correct this situation. Back to the airline example, for any given route you are limited by the number of carriers to that location. Airports are physical things with limited capacity which naturally leads to monopolies and oligopolies. That means you can't just "pay someone that's not doing that" as you only have 2 or 3 options for most locations and they all want to participate in that scheme.
That's one thing, but charging two people for the same route differently is what the parent comment was getting at, and I agree with them.
You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.
I'm not. alex43578 was shifting the goalposts from the point cogman10 was making; I acknowledged what he said, but it was besides the point. An airline charging differently depending on the time ahead of flight is sensible. An airline charging differently depending on the buyer's home address is discrimination.
You said "charging two people for the same route differently" is bad: airlines do that constantly and that's why there's dozens of fare changes, fare buckets, sales, codeshares, etc.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
They meant something more specific by "route".
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
I suppose you are misunderstanding me on purpose, but let me try again in very clear terms anyway: Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust.
What you are referring to is 'price discrimination'[1]. @alex43578 is correct in his examples. In the 'Uber/Lyft' example, his metric for service similarity in the case of a ride to the airport vs. the middle of nowhere can be seen in the distance driven. The problem is that arguments can always be made on why pricing one demographic vs another makes business sense.
In the case of Uber/Lyft, the company can say a ride to the middle of nowhere costs more than a hotspot destination because the odds of finding someone hailing another ride from there are low. This would mean the driver would have to spend more on gas picking up their next customer. Although this seems reasonable, it's probabilistic in nature. This may also not be the case, but the company must price this risk to keep their drivers happy. Well what of the case where the destination is a dangerous neighborhood where the driver feels like their life will be in danger? How do we price the risk then? And that says nothing about the possible mismatch of perception between the seller and the customer.
How about if a grocery store sells goods at a higher price to customers in lower income areas because they notice that it lowers the number of high income area customers to the point they make less profit? Is it right for that store to raise the price for identifiably lower income area customer to make up for the lost profit?
> Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust
Your statement includes things like loyalty programs and memberships. Presenting these credentials at checkout means customers are willingly giving the company "prior knowledge about them" (that they've shopped at the store before and how much they're willing to spend) unrelated to the *specific* food or service they're purchasing. Should these practices be allowed?
The point of this reply isn't to say what should or shouldn't be allowed, it's to show that I believe the issue is more nuanced than you can account for in your statement of what constitutes unjust business practices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Why is it unjust? It’s absolutely the store or individual’s choice to charge what they want to who they want, assuming that they aren’t discriminating against a protected class.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
This is possible in retail, or will soon be.
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
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?
From my comment:
> Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
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 find this comment hard to square with another of yours in the thread:
> ... If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
In my own head, this was the the most far-fetched piece of my own comment!
Just for clarification: Does this affect intraday price changes, and how much if this is AI vs. 'standard database operations'?
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
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.
If you look at the actual text of the bill, it’s much more expansive than simply profiling people. It defines dynamic pricing as, “THE PRACTICE OF VARYING THE PRICES OF CONSUMER GOODS OR SERVICES WITHIN A BUSINESS DAY BASED ON DEMAND OR OTHER FACTORS, INCLUDING THROUGH THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR MODELS THAT RETRAIN OR RECALIBRATE BASED ON RECEIVED INFORMATION IN NEAR REAL–TIME.”[1]
This absolutely would ban changing the price in the middle of the day in response to changes in temperature, as the parent comment suggested.
[1]https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895f.pdf
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
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.
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
They charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you
Which supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
Maybe because it is not my first language, but I don't mean they are doing, I am saying they can do it and it is not that difficult.
Pharmacies in my home country are notorious for making personalised prices. Some big brand grocery stores here have "fiddly" cards and face tracking.
They can easily manipulate prices to make you register yourself and then make discount based on some personalisation metric.
We are all used to it though Amzn and others. We just don't realise that all that is needed for it to get to your basket is that one of them to do it and others to follow.
We have seen many recent examples of companies applying abusive corporate practices and instead of capitalising on it, the competitors just follow with some excuse...
Because the sole driver of all of this is the UFCW. That's why only grocery stores.
Because they're still mad they think it "takes away jobs" to put in electronic ink price tags.
That's it. They came up with the rest of the FUD and latched onto clueless lawmakers.
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
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.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
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-...
Sure, but none of this is related to dynamic pricing
If they could do that they wouldve already. Grocery prices skyrocketed during covid yet margins for grocers remained bottom of the barrel.
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.
I don't see why consumers wouldn't just pick the stores that have better prices for them. Why would they know/care/need to know what the prices are doing for other people?
The issue is that consumers who can pick better stores will get better prices, while those that can't will get gouged. Imagine someone who works multiple jobs and only has time to shop at the grocery store closest to them.
The algorithmically-driven store will start by randomly showing them some random prices and seeing how they respond. If they are willing to accept high prices, the store will keep charging them more. If they leave the store and go somewhere else, the store will revert to lower prices. The store will discriminate against people who won't comparison shop for whatever reason (busy, limited access to transport, rich enough that they don't care, etc.)
However, the store's extra margins won't lead to lower prices for other consumers, even in a fully competitive market. Raising prices for consumers who won't comparison shop will do nothing to change the marginal cost of serving a consumer who does, so this won't change the competitive dynamics for those consumers and they won't see lower prices.
There's nothing unique about dynamic pricing in this situation except more efficient price discovery which I'm not sure is a bad thing for anyone.
> Raising prices for consumers who won't comparison shop will do nothing to change the marginal cost of serving a consumer who does
Of course it would. In a competitive environment (which grocery stores are), this excess capital gets reinvested into beating the competition.
> In a competitive environment (which grocery stores are), this excess capital gets reinvested into beating the competition.
That's not true though. Excess capital does not necessarily get reinvested in an efficient market. If that were the case, companies in relatively efficient markets would spend a very small portion of their free cash flow on dividends and share buybacks, which is not the case.
Let's look at Kroger specifically: https://ir.kroger.com/news/news-details/2026/Kroger-Reports-...
Of $7.2B free cash flow in 2025 they spent $3.9B on capital expenditures and about $3.6B on dividends and buybacks (those numbers don't add up because of things like loans, sale of assets, and stock issuance).
Additionally, even if companies in competitive markets did reinvest all their excess profits from personalized pricing, the benefits would only accrue to consumers that the algorithm thinks are price-sensitive.
You can't see you mean? Consumers pick things that are reasonably convenient, achievable and known to them. These things are all subject to exploitative tactics by grocery stores.
There's also price-fixing, which famously occurred in Canada recently.
Not to mention cornering a market like Walmart would and removing consumer choice entirely.
All of these are separate issues from dynamic pricing
You were not asking about dynamic pricing. You were asking why you weren't able to see the reason that consumers don't always find & choose the cheapest option. The person you were responding to was explaining the unethical realities of food retailers. There's no reason why these would disappear with dynamic pricing.
No, the entire conversation is about a change toward dynamic pricing. My comment about pricing is that dynamic pricing doesn't change the competitive dynamic between retailers. You are chiming in and saying "well there are other competitive/noncompetitive dynamics at play," which I agree with and never disputed and am not talking about.
> the market isn't that efficient
The grocery market is. Margins sit at 1-2%, there is absolutely no reason to believe dynamic pricing would change that. Grocery stores are one place where free markets have created incredible consumer surplus because competition is high.
> 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.
Sure but dynamic pricing doesn't change anything about that.
The point of personalized pricing, which is what this bill addresses, is to identify consumers who won't shop around and give them higher prices.
You can't compete that away because the consumers being hurt aren't sensitive to competition (for example, they don't have a car and therefor can't get to a different grocery store). It's an inherently anti-competitive practice.
I agree that temporal dynamic pricing might be good in some circumstances, but this bill doesn't ban it.
Anti-competitive doesn't mean "benefits from lack of competition."
Right, anti-competitive practices are where a business tries to limit competition. And dynamic pricing is anti-competitive because businesses are essentially algorithmically identifying customers whose business they don't need to compete for, and then charging them non-competitive prices.
> 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.
Because the exact same is true in reverse
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).
Your evil case is not evil
The point of pricing water to that level is that it would induce other people who have access to bottled water to bring it to that market, as is desirable
> The point of pricing water to that level is...
No, the point is to selfishly profit-maximise. I'm not trying to be difficult in saying that. The thing you describe is not the intent, it's the hypothetical effect. It may or may not do that (I don't think it typically does, take toilet paper during COVID for example).
Depends on the POV you're adopting.
Yes, the point for the individual setting that price is to selfishly profit-maximize. The point for us accepting a system that does this is because it signals to other water-bottle-holders that there is a dire need nearby and pays them to meet that need.
I don't think the example of a meme-driven pseudo-shortage of a paper good during a once in a lifetime global pandemic (causing both supply and demand shocks and significant information problems) is a very good point.
You assume that other people can simply bring bottled water to market & compete with discoverability and access to customers with established players?
Or is your point that all people in a market with leaded water should be paying $100 for pure water because it is inherently worth that much per the market.
No, I assume that if anyone can bring bottled water to market, they should have a strong incentive to do so whenever there is a strong need for more of it.
But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers. As well, these things are often blocked to newcomers because of existing deals with big players.
> But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers.
I didn't say everybody. I said anybody who can.
What you describe is exactly why it's important to have an incentive for the people who do have those resources to employ them towards getting bottled water to this lead-poisoned region...
It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
Rent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!
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.
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I mean it's very likely the MAGAcult literally just writes checks to people with Dear Leader's face/signature on them going into the midterms.
That seems bad.
>You believe that poor people don't 'pay taxes', even though all of their money and excess labor value is definitionally recirculated into the economy or back to the government?
Yes, about 31% of returns in 2022 were for people who didn't pay federal income tax. By a massive, overwhelming majority, they are lower-income levels, who also receive the most direct cash and cash-like benefits from the government.
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-doesnt-pay-incom...
>You believe in the world's most expensive healthcare, the world's most expensive universities(/hedge funds), corrupt spending on corporations, wars on behalf of the empire, and our vassal states, and 'lavish' benefits for only corporations and white people (as has been the case since we invented whiteness)?
Surely you realize healthcare and university expense is, in part, driven by all the free money the government pumps into the system, right? How successful would universities be at charging $80K a semester if not for federally subsidized student loans? I'm arguing against all the things you just listed - you seem to be confused.
>Am I correctly understanding that this status quo is your preference?
The status quo for the last 20 years is a bad thing. Our ballooning debt, as a direct result of profligate spending on all the things I listed, is a problem. Again, you seem to be very confused about my position.
>I'm also curious which benefit is specifically 'lavish'. The only social programs I'd describe as such are the programs that create billionaires.
What social program do you think creates billionaires? Even being charitable to your position, Walmart's revenue is about 4% driven by foodstamps. Even big bad Walmart isn't successful because of social programs.
As for lavish: "The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level.
A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs."
>Or do you just think that politicians shouldn't talk about rent, fuel, and food prices?
Considering politicians from both sides have repeatedly made each of these issues worse through things like rent-control and zoning restrictions or environmental restrictions and the Iran war, yes, I do think politicians should just be quiet and do less: they'd cause less damage.
>Or is your contention that the working poor just stupid for believing anything will ever get better in our two party system?
Basically any average citizen is silly for thinking their vote has an impact. Per "Testing Theories of American Politics", the preferences of the average citizen have a "near-zero, statistically non-significant impact" on public policy when the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are taken into account.
I don't know how to explain in clearer terms that, for the lowest quintile of the population, who has zero or negative net wealth. They have given every dollar they have to someone else. Be it the government or a private corporation, all their dollars act as stimulus or savings for those with more. All their excess labor value, generated from their work, also goes to other people, predominantly the wealthy.
You are annoyed they don't pay income taxes, but where are the accolades for their generosity?
> What social program do you think creates billionaires?
Elon Musk would not be a hundred billionaire without government contracts and vast government subsidies. Likewise for Ellison and Palantir and whoever else gets to hoover up our defense spending. So too for any entity that receives the myriad benefits of 'public private partnership' in domains that used to be exclusively government run. Deloitte makes bank on 'administering' public programs. The Multi-billion dollar retail Tax prep exists entirely because the government is bribed not to compete. Private prisons/concentration camps are 'social programs' that produces billions in private wealth. etc. etc.. etc...
> Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128.
> It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits.
... A person who make this little would not pay income taxes, so these credits cannot be realized.
> Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF is temporary
All of these programs are difficult to retain access to. I've never met anybody among the working poor able to realize even half of these meagre benefits.
A random family in NYC would pay, on average, $20,439 annually, just on child care, per child, thus, this hypothetical single parent is contributing at least $40k in labor to produce future workers. It's not unreasonable to give them compensation for this thankless task.
As another point of comparison, Norway spends 18k per year for every kindergartener in their nation regardless of the parent's income. This is what is known as, under capitalism, an investment with a 50 year compounding return.
Starving, homeless children produce negative externalities if they are not cared for, so the return on the investment is even more potent in this case.
All this said, you've asserted that 53k, by itself, is 'lavish'. But you are speaking to someone who regularly makes that much money in between blinks on a half-decent day in the market, so I'm not really convinced that it is.
> Basically any average citizen is silly for thinking their vote has an impact. Per "Testing Theories of American Politics", the preferences of the average citizen have a "near-zero, statistically non-significant impact" on public policy when the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are taken into account.
This is why organized, sustained political action is required above and beyond elections. So that, in aggregate, these near-zeros can create change. It's not an invitation to check out and advocate for centrist reactionary nihilistic libertarianism, which is what I have to assume your true position is.
>... All their excess labor value, generated from their work, also goes to other people, predominantly the wealthy. You are annoyed they don't pay income taxes, but where are the accolades for their generosity?
70% of the people in the lowest quintile have 0 adults working fulltime, and therefore produce effectively 0 labor value. They don't contribute, they take. Would you be OK with requiring a work, education, volunteer, or caretaking requirement for any welfare programs; to ensure that these people are actually working for society?
>Elon Musk would not be a hundred billionaire without government contracts and vast government subsidies. Likewise for Ellison and Palantir and whoever else gets to hoover up our defense spending. So too for any entity that receives the myriad benefits of 'public private partnership' in domains that used to be exclusively government run. Deloitte makes bank on 'administering' public programs. The Multi-billion dollar retail Tax prep exists entirely because the government is bribed not to compete. Private prisons/concentration camps are 'social programs' that produces billions in private wealth. etc. etc.. etc...
None of those are social programs: they required the person or company to "work" by providing a service or good that benefits people, rather than get a handout. There's a debate over the government mismanaging and misallocating the budget, but Lockheed selling a F-35 or Ellison providing compute to the government is not welfare.
> Government welfare: [The low income, underemployed family] would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits.
>>... A person who make this little would not pay income taxes, so these credits cannot be realized.
You do know what a refundable tax credit means, right? "A refundable tax credit is a credit you can get as a refund even if you don't owe any tax. - IRS"
>All of these programs are difficult to retain access to. I've never met anybody among the working poor able to realize even half of these meagre benefits.
All these programs exist and receive billions of dollars at both the state and federal level. If people aren't receiving those dollars, all the more reason to abolish the program and stop the hemorrhage of cash.
>A random family in NYC would pay, on average, $20,439 annually, just on child care, per child, thus, this hypothetical single parent is contributing at least $40k in labor to produce future workers. It's not unreasonable to give them compensation for this thankless task.
NYC is 200% more expensive higher than the national average for COL and 400% higher when counting housing. It's a terrible place to try and raise a family on a low income. NYC's budget deficit varies, but is in the billions. Subsidizing a future barista or UberEats driver to the tune of $100K or more in childcare across 5 years is ludicrous, especially when you consider that again, about 40% of people pay 0 federal taxes. Stats aren't readily available for NYC taxpayers by income, but I can guarantee that NYC would literally lose money on this "investment" at a population level.
> As another point of comparison, Norway spends 18k per year for every kindergartener in their nation regardless of the parent's income. This is what is known as, under capitalism, an investment with a 50 year compounding return.
And the US spends $18,614 per public school pupil. Again, we're already spending the money but not getting the return (see: PISA scores, graduation rates, educational outcomes).
I completely agree that ROI should be considered when making government decisions. With that in mind, let's focus on reducing low ROI migration and illegal immigration. "Immigrants without a college education and all those who immigrate to the U.S. after age 55 are universally a net fiscal burden by up to $400,000... The average newly arrived immigrant who entered the country illegally is expected to have a net fiscal burden of about $130,000 in adjusted terms, so preventing future unlawful immigration is important...Using these figures, every refugee in FY 2022 is expected to increase the federal budget deficit of the U.S. by nearly $152,000 over his lifetime".
>Starving, homeless children produce negative externalities if they are not cared for, so the return on the investment is even more potent in this case.
The US already has SNAP, WIC, TANF, Section 8, and more. Again, these children aren't starving/homeless because we aren't paying for them, but because their parents are misallocating the money we give them.
>All this said, you've asserted that 53k, by itself, is 'lavish'. But you are speaking to someone who regularly makes that much money in between blinks on a half-decent day in the market, so I'm not really convinced that it is.
Now multiply that $53K across the population, and you'll see a major contributor to the $1.9 trillion deficit.
> This is why organized, sustained political action is required above and beyond elections. So that, in aggregate, these near-zeros can create change. It's not an invitation to check out and advocate for centrist reactionary nihilistic libertarianism, which is what I have to assume your true position is.
What action do you want to advocate for? More taxes, more wasteful spending, more people not contributing to society but just taking? Before you advocate for policy, learning some tax basics like what a refundable tax credit is would go a long way.
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What could possibly go wrong?
This is the answer.
I think that opaque pricing is bad in that it creates a feeling of helplessness in the customer, is annoying and after every deal it makes you feel like you have been ripped off. Like the - call us to get a quote on some sites instead of direct pricing.
To a lesser extent it is the same with loyalty programs - my grocery stores often discount items to 50% and on my receipt it there is usually something like - you saved 20 Euro - which could be 20 to 30% of the bill. A lesser mind than the average consumer's may suspect that they keep all the prices permanently inflated by 20 to 30% and if some schmuck dare to buy their favorite cheese when not discounted - it is on them.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
Keep in mind: the only thing a capitalist fears is a truly free market.
The highest ROI for any business is to buy their own politician. That allows you to block competition and other inconveniences at a legislative level.
Al major chains in my area use Covid/etc to increase prices beyond what supply dictates to profit off of crises, except for king soopers.
https://qz.com/supermarket-prices-grocery-food-inflation-pan...
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
> 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.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
It’s likely just posturing for political support. No nation-wide law that I’m aware of exists in the US. In my state, the lowest advertised or displayed price is the honored price. They have to update the shelf price before the register’s. Any difference gets a refund which unfortunately is not automatic. Requires vigilance by the consumer but it would prevent this type of AI pricing.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
The problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. 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. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
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.
> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
Right, which would imply that a VPN that makes you look broke would help get you better prices.
Haha, no no no. I don't trust this to be true. Everyone will pay more or else the investment into this technology doen't break even.
They’ll require ID verification for everything. Like they are normalizing with age verification for social media
Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
How’s that gonna work when they know your address?
With the loopholes, stores can raise the baseline prices and give some people coupons for some products.
To avoid this reliably, shop in person at a supermarket that doesn't have a loyalty program.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
I'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
use a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time).
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
I have residence in Bulgaria and I do not necessarily agree with that statement. Glad it works for you though
I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
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
This doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
Is an if-statement considered AI?
So membership discounts should be banned?
What is a "membership discount" (assuming you don't mean coupons) in the context of a grocery store? Can you give an example of a major grocery store that has one?
For what it's worth,
> The bill clarifies that certain practices, such as promotional pricing, loyalty programs, or price differences based on objective costs like shipping, are not considered prohibited dynamic pricing.
Safeway/king soopers/albertsons all have members only lower prices or membership-only benefits
Harris Teeter is an example of a large chain that has promotions (not coupons) that are applied at checkout only if you have your VIC card (their free membership program). There’s a lot of BOGO, a few dollars off etc offers that are tagged to the price label throughout the store.
I used to shop at HT at the last place I lived. It was always crazy seeing all of those discounts pop up. I don't know if I was actually saving money over the other stores nearby but it certainly felt like it. Honestly, I like shopping at Lidl now. My grocery bill always feels much cheaper. I don't get much savings using my phone number, I think they want you to clip coupons on the app but I still walk out paying less than I would elsewhere. A large portion of the stuff at Lidl are not major brands, I suspect they are the companies that produce white label products for store brands.
Got it, thank you for the example. That seems to be still allowed by the bill.
The behavior targeted here seems to be more like "Our data indicates this person is poor and desperate, let's charge them more for rice and beans than we charge other people, since that's most of what they'll buy. We've calculated that we can charge up to $X to exhaust their budget/foodstamps and they'll still buy."
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Sure, I was asking about membership discounts (e.g. people who shop at this store and are "members" get 10% off everything compared to "non-members"), vs loyalty programs with individual product electronic coupons/promotions, which aren't covered by this bill.
Typical European loyalty programs offer spend-based ‘points’ accumulation which can be spent as a discount later. Additional offers on top of that like ‘bonus points on product X’ or personalized offers based on purchase history add to the degree of variation in how much individual customers end up spending.
Yeah, it seems that is allowed.
If a store exists that has a "membership discount" (e.g. members get 10% off their purchase), like maybe GNC does, it seems that would be allowed, too.
> So membership discounts should be banned?
No, not at all, not even close to what is being discussed here. You should probably do a LOT more research to understand what kind of pricing they are talking about here, and what AI is. None of these things are apparently things you are remotely aware of at all in any way for you to suggest it's merely "if-statement."
You can do it! I believe in you!
What about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
I think people are often just logged in for years and forget they're reading a paid resource.
The end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
No, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
> the unhealthier you are, the more you pay.
I'd re-write that as "the more you consume the more you pay". Seems normal.
In most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
Should there be any consumer surplus?
And also to eliminate all competition who doesn't have enough money to compete
Regarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
> Most of Europe has this problem solved.
With paracetamol :)
(Dutch people know what I am talking about)
For those of us who aren't Dutch, please enlighten
> What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation?
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
The US also pays relatvely more, not just absolute. Where could I see the US system delivering then? Not sure the data is so clear cut there.
Because aggregate statistics completely fail to recognise the massive philosophical differences in the system. It is like saying someone who buys Ferrari is getting ripped off because they aren't choosing to ride a bike.
The US pays more because it provides significantly greater coverage outside of aggregate statistics. All of the innovation in rare diseases is because of the US, in public healthcare systems some diseases are simply not treated because it isn't regarded as economic to do so. How do you even quantify that difference? It is like making a GDP comparison between 1800 and today, what price would someone in 1800 not to die of TB? Life expectancy of 20 years old in many countries? Anyone who compares the two things in terms of cost is a lunatic.
In short though, it is not obvious that a high-cost healthcare system is worse. The US system is inefficient, almost all of this relates to their decision not to use universal healthcare which leads to problems pricing insurance. However, this is not related to the system, there are many countries in Europe and worldwide which have effective private healthcare systems.
Not saying a high cost system is worse rather that seeing the benefits in data isn't so easy. Not clear what the "right" costs for a system should be, I reckon.
As to drug discovery etc.: I think, not easy to say how the world would look like if the US weren't offering the opportunities. What would be new equilibrium RoIs needed if the world were quite different (and, yes, I am aware of studies there).
> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
It's "bigger" in the sense it spends more money per capita. Something very American exceptionalist about the OP suggesting that this is somehow more relevant than it covering fewer people and treatments.
The point is that Europeans seem to believe that the US does not have a public healthcare system, it does.
I am not sure what your point is about covering fewer people either. The point of public healthcare systems is that there are redistributive, correct? The reason the US public healthcare system does not cover everyone is because there are people who can pay for their own healthcare...which is the same in Europe. I live in Europe, in a system with "free healthcare", I pay $100/month for private healthcare because queues for most things are multiple years long AND I pay $1-1.5k/month for other people to use the public healthcare system I can't use.
But actually Europeans merely correctly believe that the US is unique in how many of its citizens it allows to die from preventable deaths due to them not being able to afford healthcare whilst technically not being poor enough to meet the state aid criteria either. I am not sure you are in a position to lecture about European ignorance when you're implying everyone in the US who is ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid can afford a comprehensive insurance plan.
The irony is in the US rather than paying a low amount on private healthcare so that you could potentially beat the queue on relatively low cost state healthcare, you would be paying a much higher rate for private healthcare with more copays and coverage exemptions and also contributing a higher portion of your taxes to a publicly funded insurance program you wouldn't be able to access at all when you lost your job or your insurer denied treatment.
> life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
So, are American just inherently less disciplined that Europeans? Is that the issue with healthcare in America?
I find this explanation very unsatisfying. You have to look at systems to understand what is actually happening.
>So, are American just inherently less disciplined that Europeans?
I never said anything like that but you could be right on that. A lot of those lifestyle issues are creeping in other highly urbanized rich western countries. Especially mental illnesses due to loneliness, lack of family unit, poor economic outlook, etc
>I find this explanation very unsatisfying.
Then come up with a better one and share it.
If you want to compare the success of health systems you need to compare just the health systems between them alone, not the life expectancy with is a cumulus of several other factors beyond the public + privately managed health systems, such as lifestyles, agriculture, diet, weather, genetics, income, exercise, pollution, etc.
For example, compare waiting times for MRIs, treatments, operations, procedures, post-op infection rates, etc then compare the life expectancy of those who undergo those procedures/treatments, etc.
>You have to look at systems to understand what is actually happening.
I just did.
Here goes:
Healthcare is an inelastic market, people are willing to pay anything to get it. Private insurance companies have grown into a kind of cartel and are able to jack up prices at will, going as high as customers are able to pay. They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins. These companies are so powerful, and officials are so easily corrupted, that they are able to get their way with legislation every time.
All of this combines into a huge vicious cycle that is able to extract more and more wealth for worse and worse results.
Americans used to live longer than Europeans, you know? Now it's the opposite. Certainly, food in America is worse and people drive more instead of walking. But then again, the State isn't incentivized to keep its citizenry healthy, since it doesn't pay for healthcare. To me, this is part of a package deal, there's no sense in trying to decorrelate public health from healthcare systems.
>Americans used to live longer than Europeans, you know?
When, in WW2?
>They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins.
I've experience both systems. It's worse (for me) with European state-run healthcare I am right now, where they are even more disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, except not to increase margins but because the system is constantly broke, so the treatments are always long-wait and last-gen compared to the cutting edge fast-track you get in the US, if you're insured, or you pay through the nose for it, or your insurance does if you work for a decent company.
So that doesn't explain why Americans live less despite being able to get cutting edge care faster. You know, maybe a diet of processed food and sedentary lifestyle can't be undone by a faster MRI/surgery appointment with cutting edge equipment.
> So that doesn't explain why Americans live less despite being able to get cutting edge care faster.
Yes it does. Average lifespan in an average. Americans have worse access to healthcare on average than Europeans, hence why they die sooner on average. European systems may be worse for you specifically, because you are wealthy enough to get "fast-tracked" in the US. But America's just a worse system overall.
And you're wrong about incentives for state-provided healthcare. A competent government would recognize that healthy citizens are more productive and bring in more tax revenue. Too bad we're currently run by reactionary morons, but that can always change in the future.
> maybe a diet of processed food and sedentary lifestyle can't be undone by a faster MRI/surgery appointment with cutting edge equipment.
I seriously doubt that people are that much healthier in the EU, enough to explain away all the difference in life expectancy, when Americans have provably worse access to healthcare. Around 7.3% of American adults couldn't get access to necessary healthcare for cost reasons in 2024 [0].
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/access-to-health-care.htm
No, you don't understand, the government must do everything.
Life expectancy for a country of 300m compared with a subsection of Europe that is most wealthy...seems like a fairly disingenuous comparison.
Are you one of those people that believes most American schools are shooting ranges too?
All of the problems in the US are concentrated in subsections of the population (just as in Europe). America is a wealthy country that has a mix of south American and African problems attached to it. There is no healthcare system that is going to be able to fix this. Europe has the same problem, the difference is that share of the population was typically much smaller than the US.
I didn't say anything about the cost of healthcare on average. The US already has a public healthcare system, it doesn't work well expecting that to magically improve is not smart (again, particularly when you have evidence from other countries, even in magic Europe-land, that private healthcare can work effectively).
"The US already has a public healthcare system, it doesn't work well "
Medicare works pretty well and the VA works pretty well despite all the negative propaganda. Both are different systems but both have government regulations on pricing.
People are pretending that in the private US health care system everybody gets stellar treatment without waiting times. That is simply not true. When I compare the waiting times my family in Germany has vs how much friends in the US are waiting, I don't see much difference. US quality doesn't seem better either. The main difference seems to be that in the US people are constantly strategizing whether they want to risk paying a month's salary for taking an ambulance or going bankrupt when they have a serious illness. Whereas in Germany they go to the doctor when they need to.
Yes, you can have super shiny new treatments in the US if you can pay but I prefer a system that first covers the most common problems in an affordable way.
> Life expectancy for a country of 300m compared with a subsection of Europe that is most wealthy...seems like a fairly disingenuous comparison.
Always the same weird "You don't understand, America is really big" argument. GDP per capita is higher there than in anywhere in western Europe. Why is your healthcare system delivering worse results for much higher price? It's a simple question, and the answer is equally simple: private insurance acts as an useless and bloated middleman whose incentives are opposite to providing quality healthcare to its customers. They want to be paid the most in exchange for the least service. Couple that to a bought political class and you've got the least efficient healthcare system in the developed world.
> Are you one of those people that believes most American schools are shooting ranges too?
Strawman. I don't.
> America is a wealthy country that has a mix of south American and African problems attached to it.
???
If you mean to say that America is providing for the world, that's an insane position to hold. The USA are extracting much more wealth from these places than they are injecting.
>the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country.
Probably because Europeans commenting don't know how big Medicare and Medicaid are.
They should leave dynamic pricing. The rich could then hire poor people to do their shopping. Everybody wins. This is semi sarcastic. In chasing absolute maximum returns they open themselves for eventual gaming of the system.
This seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
That shit is evil
Yes, and it's already in many places where possible, e.g. taxi, airlines, online stores and services, insurance, health, etc.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951007
Can we do the same for DRAM prices please?
AI is not a technology. It's a (shitty) political artefact of control, to bring people to pay more, own less, depend on a few capitalist owners for their livelihoods.
We must fight it
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Supply curves are literally predicated on one price for a market.
If by this you mean that standard supply-demand economics can't model price discrimination, which is what's going on here, that's not correct. See, for example, Chapter 10 of David Friedman's Price Theory, where he models price discrimination using supply and demand curves just fine. In terms of this kind of analysis, price discrimination is a way for sellers to try to transfer as much as possible of what would otherwise be consumer surplus, to themselves.
And the buyer tries to pay as little as possible. Negotiating is a skill well worth learning (lots of books on it).
The buyer in a grocery store can't negotiate; the store just sets the price and the buyer's only choice is to take it or leave it. Under the conditions described, the product is still worth it to the buyer who the store is charging the higher price (the one the store knows has more income and so can afford to pay more), at the higher price--there's just less consumer surplus. So the buyer still buys the product. But there's no negotiation anywhere; there's no opportunity for it.
The store manager has a lot of flexibility, and some of the staff are also empowered to take care of things.
If you feel you are being overcharged, see the manager. If you're nice to them, you can negotiate. Remind him how many years you've been a loyal customer. Being polite and friendly works, being a jerk does not.
The ultimate negotiating tactic is to explain your position politely to the store manager, and walk out.
I remember buying a car from a dealer. The dealer wouldn't agree to my price. He was adamant about it. So I got up, left, got in my car, started the engine, and backed out. The dealer came running out of the showroom and said he'd match my price.
Businessmen will always tell you that prices aren't negotiable. That is a tactic for rubes.
All of this is very nice--and irrelevant to the point under discussion.
Under the scenario that the Maryland law is outlawing, the richer customer who is being charged the higher price by the grocery store still finds the product to be worth it to them at the higher price. And since their time has value, and they're just grocery shopping, and they're rich and not trying to pinch pennies, they'll just buy the thing at the price the store is asking. There will be less consumer surplus for them, as I said, than there would be if the store were charging them the same price as the average middle class person--but it's highly doubtful that it will be worth their time to try to extract that extra consumer surplus from the store. That's why stores want to price discriminate in the first place--because they know the richer customers won't bother trying to haggle over price.
So if the rich people don't want to bother haggling, why does the government feel there is a need for this law?
From what the article says, it looks to be political pressure about protecting privacy and "consumer rights". Whether the law actually does what the politicians say it's for, is a different question.
This discussion is perverse. Negotiations require leverage, which the average grocery buyer in the USA does not have. As a society we don't benefit from min-maxing absolutely every opportunity.
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Government stores are fine then?
The PX is subsidized by the taxpayers, and it's a benefit provided to members of the military and their families. A military base is a socialist paradise, which only works because taxpayers pay for it.
My dad grew up a socialist. He was cured of that affliction after living on military bases for years. For example, the economy on a base on the surface looks like a money based economy. But it isn't. The actual economy is based on rank and a currency of mutual favors. For example, the guy who allocates base housing to you obliges you to return a favor if you get better quarters.
Having a higher rank means you can grant more favors, and so get more favors in return.
The USSR economy ran like that, too, on a massive scale.
P.S. The USSR's actual prices on things included the time spent waiting in line. People would pay others to wait in line for them. Talk about inefficiency!
Not sure what the means of production are that are under societal ownership with respect to the military.
Anyway, how non-human relationship driven do you think the private economy is?
Personal favors do play a role in the private economy, but money is still the dominant currency. Under socialism, the dominant currency is favors. Favors are a form of barter, and barter economies are inefficient. I can explain why if you like.
You decide if a price is worth it to you. The LSD is just an aggregation of that.
Not sure that is applicable here.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
That has always happened. If you go to a flea market, do you think the seller isn't going to bump up the price if you look prosperous or desperate? Do you think the roof replacement company isn't going to make a bid based on how wealthy or poor your neighborhood looks? Or you need a new water heater? Do you think grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods charge more?
We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no".
BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?
At the flea market you can haggle. Are you saying we should all have to haggle with the harried checkout person over the price of milk ever time we shop? Or everything is self checkout and you don't haggle but then choose whether you accept the price or not?
As with many things in technology, it's not about the raw concept, it's about the automation of it and inability to appeal to a human. Haggling face to face is human. Having a bot decide what you are paying (take it or leave it) is asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo.
I've never encountered or heard of a grocery store that didn't mark the prices on the shelves.
> asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo
You have the power to say "no". The only transactions you are forced into are the ones dealing with the government or the mob.
> inability to appeal to a human
I was stonewalled by a gigantic corporation the other day over a substantial sum of money. I googled the name and address of the CEO, and sent him a hand written polite letter. My issue was promptly resolved.
I know the CEO didn't read the letter. But he has staff that does, and hand writing a letter will get their attention, as well as reminding them that I was a loyal customer.
These are all hassles. Hassles add up to corpo power. These frictions benefit them. That was the crux of my point.
Better that you stick to promoting D instead of defending price gouging.
The inevitable result of government setting prices is some combination of:
1. shortages
2. gluts
3. black markets
It doesn't matter what your or my opinion on it is, any more than having an opinion on F=ma. The Law of Supply and Demand is always in play.
There are thousands of years of history on this.
This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination. It's forbidding sellers from transferring consumer surplus to themselves by charging a higher price to customers that would be willing to pay a higher price for the same item. But the item is still available to buyers that wouldn't want to pay the higher price--at the lower price. The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them. Whether they will try to find other ways of increasing their profit over what they get when every customer pays the price that's equal to their marginal cost, is a different question.
> This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination.
I.e. the government is regulating prices, yet another attempt going on for 4,000 years of trying and failing to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
> The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them.
Allow me to explain how prices are set:
Consider an appliance store. They want to sell refrigerators. What do they do? They have 3 refrigerator lines - the stripper, the midline, and the lux. The purpose of the stripper is that is what they advertise, to bring customers into the store. The purpose of the midrange is to upsell those who come for the stripper, as they think the extra features are worth it. The lux is sold to the wealthy customers who just want to buy the best. (Not having a lux is means the retailer is throwing easy money away.)
The moneymaker is the midrange.
You'll see the same thing in the grocery store. The store advertises the price of milk, which is likely at below cost (called a "loss leader"). People come to buy the milk, which is always on the back wall of the store. The customer has to pass by all kinds of things to get to the milk, and they'll buy it. The most overpriced stuff will be next to the checkout line.
Cheeses come in cheap, midrange, and lux, too.
There's been an extensive amount of research on exactly how to set up the store to maximize profits, which is necessary as grocery stores have razor thin margins.
BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
> the government is regulating prices
The government is regulating one particular thing that many sellers try to do (price discrimination). But it is not preventing sellers from adjusting their prices based on supply and demand. The seller can still set price equal to marginal cost--i.e., where the supply and demand curves cross--to maximize profit. They just can't extract further profit by charging richer customers more than marginal cost to transfer the consumer surplus to themselves.
> Allow me to explain how prices are set
Spare me your patronizing. I already referred to a textbook on price theory elsewhere in the thread. I know how it works. That should be evident from what I posted above and earlier in the thread.
None of what you describe is price discrimination--nor is any of it outlawed by the law under discussion here. You are describing marketing strategies involving different products--different levels of quality. Of course sellers do those things all the time, and they can continue to do it under this law.
What the law under discussion here outlaws is charging different customers different prices for the same product--for example, the appliance store you describe charging the rich person a higher price for the same refrigerator--say the midline--than the average middle class person. It says nothing whatever about the rich person paying more for a better refrigerator--the lux--than the average middle class person pays for the midline.
As you can negotiate prices at an appliance dealership, obviously people pay different prices for the same thing. The prices at the grocery store change daily, obviously people are paying different prices for the same thing. The guy you sit next to on an airplane paid a different price than you did. The pump price at the gas station can change hourly.
> They just can't extract further profit by charging richer customers more than marginal cost to transfer the consumer surplus to themselves.
The demand curve is different for every customer.
It is fraudulent to charge more than the posted price. But absent that, it's a negotiated price.
BTW, do you also feel it is unfair if a store charges a person less if the store realizes the person is a bit needy?
Just for fun, watch the movie "Back To School" starring Rodney Dangerfield. The funniest bit in it is when Dangerfield (a real estate developer) lectures the business professor on how business really works.
I've run multiple businesses. It's pretty clear that I did not have any power over the customers. I could not just raise prices and "extract" more profit, much as I would have liked to. It's hard to make money running a business. Businesses go bust all the time. I wouldn't pay too much attention to a business professor who had never run a business.
> The demand curve is different for every customer.
No, the price the customer is willing to pay for a given product is different for every customer. But the demand curve is just the aggregate of all that--how many customers are willing to pay a given price for the product, as a function of the price. There are different demand curves for different products, but the notion that there is a different demand curve for every customer for a single product makes no sense.
> BTW, do you also feel it is unfair if a store charges a person less if the store realizes the person is a bit needy?
I've said nothing whatever about whether or not I agree with the Maryland law under discussion here. I'm just trying to be clear about what the law does and doesn't do.
> I could not just raise prices and "extract" more profit
You can't raise prices for all customers and expect more profit, of course.
But if you can raise prices only for those customers who are willing to pay higher prices, i.e., if you can price discriminate, then yes, you can extract more profit by doing that--as I've said multiple times now, you're transferring what would otherwise be consumer surplus to yourself. And if the cost to you of getting the extra information you need to price discriminate is less than the consumer surplus you're able to extract by doing so, then it's profitable for you to do it if you can.
Doing what I've just described is what the law under discussion here outlaws.
> BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
Many stores are rolling out electronic price tags on the shelves, which can be rapidly updated wirelessly [1]. They could probably do the price adjustment there. I'd assume they wouldn't want to make it too blatant, which would be a challenge.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-digital-price-tag-sh...
If it adjusted the prices as someone approaches, I suspect customers would soon notice it.
I'm not going to order food at a restaurant if the menu has no prices on it, even if I'm a zillionaire.
Actually, restaurants that cater to the very rich often don't have any prices on the menu, on the theory that if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it.
I've been to the most expensive restaurant in Seattle, and there were prices on the menu. (It was for a special date, and worth every penny.)
I'm sure there are some, though, but I disagree with your theory. My theory is the patrons do it to show off their wealth by disregarding the prices.
Somehow we did just fine without real-time per-customer price discrimination.
As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's been going on since the first fruit stand thousands of years ago.
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is this some kind of sarcasm that my iq isn't high enough to understand? pretty sure everyone hates the idea of dynamic pricing
Agree. Further, not sure if 'black and white' is an idiom about clarity or an attempt to inject race into it.
This actually seems like a pretty uniting issue. I haven't seen many politicians of any party openly come out in favor of the sort of price discrimination banned by this bill.
Came to say the same thing. Though calling it 'price discrimination' will bring out the MAGAs who will reflexively conclude that banning it must be woke/DEI and then demand to have it everywhere. Better to call it 'diverse pricing' to get the opposite reaction.
"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.
I think that was the idea, that MAGAs would see "price discrimination" as a good thing, but "diverse pricing" as a bad thing.
FWIW, Trump's FTC dropped a price discrimination lawsuit against Pepsi after Pepsi donated $500k to Trump's inauguration. The suit was brought up under Biden's administration.
Republican politicians do support price discrimination. It fits in with their pro big business, anti consumer policies. To recognize this and then quibble over "the sort" or how "openly" they support it, is disingenuous.
If only we could be free from this virus! When I encounter a fellow grocery store price gouger, I am not filled with the sense of fraternity and compassion I should. Instead, I have been manipulated into feeling like they're my enemy!
This is coming off as something I would see in r/iamverysmart. I only see this coming from people that self-declared "independents" who try to play the "both sides" card and won't ever stand for anything. Which really just says everything you need to know. (If this isn't you, don't worry! The comment just comes across as an indicator.)
That you would bring this up here is odd. This topic is hardly deeply divisive, nor is it a new issue. That you think so is more a case of you not reading the news.
The topic of AI surveillance pricing is almost exclusively covered by left-leaning media sources according to ground news and party affiliation largely predicted the vote with no 100% of voting Democratic legislators for and 88% of voting republicans against it.
It feels like a partisan issue.
But I guess I don't read the news.
> 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.
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
The ban is specifically on adjusting prices _per-consumer_ based on data known/collected/stolen/assumed about the consumer.
Which is wild, because things like car dealerships, airline tickets and many more do it already.
Not to mention seniors discounts, active military, and all kinds of things.
Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
Sure but they weren't trying to price per category, they were trying to grab as much of the area under the demand curve as possible. Given what was possible, that's all they could do.
There is a market solution to this - don't shop at places which do it. If I go to the supermarket and they jack up the price of bread because I'm in a rush and 40 something wearing a suit I'm likely to spew venom, pay that one time, and never, ever come back.
Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
Kroger and the others operate razor thin margins. They offer programs for low income consumers, support local and national charities, do second chance hiring and specifically create unique roles for people with disabilities. They aren’t required to do ANY of those things in most places that they operate.
You think this is like 1800s levels of economic development?
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
Note for people who don't know:
They profile you and offer discounts based on your past purchases