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Already here in Canada.
If my local store switches to digital price tags to do this I’m just going to gather as many as I can and flush them down the toilet.
My local Woolies has had e-ink tags for at least two years, maybe more. Between this and Coles hiring Palantir, we mostly shop at Aldi. Bunnings and Kmart using facial recognition as if it’s no biggie as well. How long until they partner with CBA to check your credit card limit as you stand in front of the bananas to see how much you’ll pay?
They’re opening an Aldi’s near me. I’m excited.
Aldi’s is the shit. No bloat, no bs, just groceries. They don’t have some stuff, but for the staples you’re set. I usually go to the more traditional grocery store every 4th trip or so.
It’s a nice thought but good luck not getting caught on the 3k cameras in the store and following you to your car.
Of course I wouldn’t be doing it without some preparation.
It would be a shame if your phone was infected by a malware that rewrites all the prices in the tags in your vicinity.
Why is everything suddenly $800.85? :-P
These tags are e-ink, so there could be monochrome pictures!
Haha, ASCII schlongs begone! Now there are pictures.
Security cameras in stores are kept purposely garbage so they don’t get bugged by the police to provide footage to them. Unless something changed in the last decade since I worked in a retail joint.
I can tell you from personal experience that there exists a very happy corporate servant who is happy to give footage to police. The security cameras in some stores are shit because the owner is cheap (this is the case with most gas stations).
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Why would they care?
already here. just ask the inflation (not an american)
It definitely wasn’t QE.
thats the joke. that inflation is dymanic we already have it.
I will institute my own “dynamic pricing” scheme if this ever happens
Is it really dynamic if the price is always “free”?
If the price changes for them specifically, yes. That’s the entire concept they’re pushing here.
surely negative numbers are in the cards? since we deserve the compensation for all the trouble
Wait for all the codeberg projects tryna break these things
Finally, a practical reason to have a flipper zero or similar.
Haha, that’s a perfect application for an otherwise almost useless (but incredible) device
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m obviously not gonna steal anything. Sure, accidents happen from time to time. The supermarket decided to replace their cashiers with self checkout operated by random non-employees, after all. If I happen to ring up filet mignon as a Roma tomato, I think that’s just the inevitable result of outsourcing your labor to untrained civilians with no incentive to accurately do the job .
Its much easier than you’d think.
Thanks. I hate it.
It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:
Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:
- sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
- stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.
Once dynamic pricing is ultimately accepted as the norm, what is the lowest price? Also, if you have the ability to instantly correct pricing “mistakes”, then you never have to stop selling the product. There’s no penalty for gouging people until someone notices, and you can instantly revert to a known tolerable price and start over.
If dynamic pricing is legal, and accepted by the consumer, whether as frequent expected pricing fluctuations, or the worst case scenario of personalised pricing, these protections may well be unenforceable.
What law? In what country?
The closest thing I can think of would be Quebec, they have some fairly strong consumer protections, but i don’t know how far they would extend in cases like this
Australia, the country the article is talking about. That was a quote from the ACCC website.
stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected
Not a lawyer but couldn’t they just refuse to sell it to you? We all know it would be bullshit but couldn’t a company say “Oh that minimum wage clerk made a mistake, but don’t blame them, just an honest mistake.”
Or is the law, if it’s on the shelf, it must be honored?
They would have to refuse to sell to anyone. It would likely not be lawful to leave it on the shelf and sell it at the higher price to someone else who might not have noticed the discrepancy, until they fix up the shelf pricing.
Not sure how much longer people are going to think I’m crazy for living abroad.
It’s obviously shitty and exploitive anywhere, but this makes food desserts even more of an issue.
Scummy ass companies making life worse for everyone to line their pockets.
They wouldn’t even be in financial trouble, they would just be less rich.
Boycott the stores that use them, it might help them change their mind behind they become the norm.
This is Australia and I think 90% of grocery shops are either this one or the competitor
I knew it was Australia, didn’t realise that there was such a monopoly. Still possible, just makes it harder. Are there stores that aren’t part of any chain? They’re dying out here, usually the owners have signed up to a franchise.
It’s unlikely to happen anyway, but there should be a way that we can universally stop greed.
The chain grocery store near us (Safeway) has had stupidly high prices since the pandemic. I decided I’m not going to shop there anymore unless I really have to. We are lucky to have a locally-owned, small chain grocery store very close to us. Prices are high but honestly not much if at all higher than Safeway and I’d rather pay a small premium to help them stay in business. Also I doubt they would ever opt into something like this stupid price scheme, but Safeway absolutely would and will.
i just went to safeway like last year, in like 10 years. and was surprised expensive things were, compared to even walgreens, WF and trader joes. even WG have some useful things at a sale sometimes, and some of thier generic products of hygeine products are cheaper than elsewhere. WF has sales all the time cheaper if you have prime(yea i know some people dont like prime for one reason).
I’ve heard that too; I’m not a WF shopper myself but a lot of other parents at my kids’ school are and that’s what they’ve told me. Bonkers.
Yeah, Safeway has been shitty for a long time. I’m fortunate like you that we have a wealth of independent grocers and small ethnic markets that are so much better. They’re also a fair bit cheaper too.
It is a subsidiary of Albertsons after being acquired by private equity investors led by Cerberus Capital Management in January 2015.
Classic
of course it was.
That explains a lot. Private equity kills everything it touches.
These have got to be hackable in a fun way
If they got batteries
I want them batteries
Firmware on these is pretty tight. They’re usually using CC2510s or CC2530s. The CC2510 has a voltage glitch hack that you can use to attempt to read the contents via the DCOUPL capcitor, but it’s not very effective and you can only read a few bytes per attack.
You can see a github some tools some have created here. Eventually someone is going to read the firmware off theses and be able to hack them, it’s just a matter of time.
I’d assume the firmware is the same shipped with the vendor or pretty much very close to the sample code.
Does it require something like an API key or password? Can these implement diff Hellman key exchange? Otherwise I’d just assume you can eavesdrop when someone is updating the contents.
In Spain we’ve had those for years now, and prices are as stupidly high in the stores with paper ones…
Hook it up with BT id you can’t turn off in your phone - bada bing
I’m still not clear on exactly what triggers this. Is it phone location, because a phone number is linked to all your data (unless you’ve been gaming it for the last 5-10yrs)? Do I walk by with my phone and the price goes up?
Is it like goodwill? Does the price change as you’re checking out? Do I grab a 2lb bag of medium roast coffee beans for $13, and because buying it consistently for decades, it’s now $18 at checkout? But is still $13 for the guy behind me who decided to try whole bean over pre-ground?
If rich people turn off their phones before hitting the parking lot and poor people leave theirs on, does the entire store get cheaper?
If you take a pic with your phone of the “advertised” price does that mitigate sudden increases while checking out, if you’re even watching?
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
What are the triggers?
I can imagine price stickers would update daily, and individual users would get personalized discounts on their app.
App-less buyers would pay the baseline price in the sticker, app users would pay less. Like existing loyalty card programs, but with more data collection
That’s the personalized prices. That’s step two.
This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.
We’ve had them for quite some time. They don’t change price for individual customers, I don’t think they change the price in the middle of the day either. But, I guess, they can change the prices just before opening, like if the wether service forecasts a rainy day they could rise the price of umbrellas and raincoats. Cold? Hot chocolate and soups. Hot? Ice cream and cold drinks. Certain asshole died overnight? Champaign and confetti cannons through the roof. And so on…
They don’t currently, but they could.
Take brand x on the shelf. Sold for $5 at a profit of $1. They sell 10 per week. You buy 2 if those every week, on Wednesday at about 6pm. Why not make them $5.50 next Wednesday and see what happens. Normal price on other days as no pattern identified.
Then once that’s successful, why not have beacons detecting your phone, or even the stores app feeding your location. Then they can update just for the hours you are there.
Oh, but you’ll say you swore it said $5 when you picked it off the shelf. The worker will say they have to charge what’s there now and what it scanned as. Your choice to purchase it or go look for something else.
They’ve already started all this crap with online purchasing. It’s just moving it to retail.
The industry calls this “clientelling”
Surge pricing really only works when you put the customer in isolation. Uber can do it because you’re the only one seeing the rate for the trip you want to take. Amazon can do it because you’re shopping while taking a shit at work. Nobody else sees the prices in your online shopping cart, that’s not the case in retail.
The profit motive behind these tags is wage savings. It saves in the time it takes to change out price tags when the prices do change. It saves in the time used in finding and replacing missing or damaged tags. It saves in the amount of manual price corrections at the till when the tag doesn’t match the till because the tag wasn’t updated - or the lost time and revenue if someone abandons their cart because of said disagreement.
Could they do what you’re saying? Technologically speaking, it’s been possible for several years - we’ve had these tags on most major store shelves in Canada for a very long time now and apps tracking our every move. Why hasn’t it happened already? These stores have had everything they need to implement this scheme, and of all the shady cunts in this world, Galen Weston would have by now if it could have turned a profit.
It’s easier to just price-fix the bread and pay a fraction of your profit in lawsuit settlements decades later than to do what you’re describing.
I a shop with 10 products, yes, I’d agree. In a supermarket with thousands of products, they can predict what you’re likely to buy if you’re a regular customer and you might be the only one buying those items that day.
I don’t expect them to do it overnight. First they roll them out for the cost savings. Just like they did with barcodes rather than price labels. Then they start to look at other savings or profit centres.
After a while it becomes, why wouldn’t they do it?
Why go through the trouble of gaslighting someone with digital price tags somehow changing the price on the fly based on whoever happens to be looking at it (BTW, what happens if two people with different price profiles are looking at the tag at the same time?), when they could just remove the tags entirely or even more likely, just close the store and force you to shop online where they can do all the usual online price fuckery?
Some countries require pricing to be visible. I would assume, just like online, they will use algorithms and ai to figure out what price point gives the most profit. Its only trouble to set up. The corporate world doesn’t look at trouble. They look at cost. If the return investment is positive, they do it. If it’s high, they do it as a priority.
Not all retail is online. Much is but not all. Groceries is one that is often better in person for that evenings meal on the way home from work. It’s led to the rise of metro style supermarkets near transport hubs.
Grocery is already going online, look at all the companies sponsoring youtube vids. The margins for what you’re describing are, at the absolute best, razor-thin.
E-tags draw significantly more profit from things like one-day (loss leader) flash sales, or in-store specials, or other conventional retail pricing tactics.
Take a 4-hour sale on some popular product, put an ad up on Instagram to get people in your store on the way home from work and you make a mint. You don’t need E-tags to do that, but it means that you don’t have to pay someone to change out the paper tags on that product twice in their shift.
You’re getting distracted by the least likely way they’ll fuck you over, when they’re just sticking to tried-and-true collusion.
surge pricing is what you are referring to which is pretty much the main form of dynamic pricing.
Oh, you mean price gouging
Oh, no no no. It’s called “capitalism”. Supply and demand pricing at it’s finest! /s
OP was making a lot of shit up.
It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.
Those e-ink tags have been around in the UK for some time.
The displays are not the problem
Them updating on a whim is
