Unless there is a physical process preventing an incentivized company to not raise the price in bait and switch manner, it will happen; and the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because they know people are paying attention right now. Once that buzz disappears, then the corruption begins.
The problem also with messing with the food supply, even when it is for profit, it is also a national security issue when people can't get food.
History has a long memory of such things where corrupt profiteering people ended up facing a brass verdict.
The reason it doesn't happen is that the grocery business doesn't operate like a techbro fever dream. It's a commodity business that depends on repeat customers. The financial incentive for digital labels is in saving on labor costs and price overrides, not screwing your customers out of a few pennies by introducing price confusion.
This is mistaken. There is the cost in labor to replace signage, and the delay in time for that replacement to completely occur, as well as the regulatory required related to signage.
The point of sale is bound to the signage price. There are laws against bait and switching, and other deceptive business practices where electronic instantly updated prices would fall afoul when they get to the register and the mechanics of a bait and switch are in full force (violating law).
Online orders following dynamic prices also run into the same issues.
Dynamic pricing is just bait and switch pricing, and the courts will eventually confirm this. The method adjusts the price upwards when it shows more demand (as they claim), and they define demand as the number of people visiting, or more accurately the number of clients connecting. This can be sockpuppet clients of a vendor that algorithmically join to boost the price like any shill.
I've seen this happen with items where they adjust it up 15-25%, and don't show that adjustment till after they've charged you. 15% for a $10 item is a lot less than 15% for a $1300 item. Would you find it acceptable if they just tacked on $195 in surge pricing or more.
To understand this clearly, you need to understand this isn't demand. Demand as a cohort only includes the number of people that would make an exchange at a given price level. What they are actually measuring is a Need cohort, and they misleadingly conflate and assume that this is demand because it is in their interest so they can charge a higher price deceptively.
A Need Cohort includes all the people who will not make that exchange. That's everyone that visits and leaves without purchasing, and in reality, its the entire population that wouldn't purchase the item but would find some marginal need for that item if they had it (including the entire secondhand market).
Consolidated monopolies aren't about screwing customers out of pennies. Its all about screwing them out of the percentages based on the goods they sell, and what they think they can get away with given their position which is capable of holding a geographic region hostage.
For an example, the Egg price fixing where they claimed they had to cull all these birds because of avian flu, they raised the egg prices to roughly $15/dozen, and somehow produced more eggs than birds alive in the same time period. The same thing happened with expiring meat where the meat manufacturers negotiated a lower-price buyback for all expiring meat products to limit those loss lieder sales making it to the public. It was speculated the meat was repurposed/processed and sold as pet food.
Price discovery for goods has requirements that must be met, and aren't met under monopolies engaging in dynamic pricing. There are also well known methods for identifying price inflexibility in demand which do not include price confusion.
Bait and switching in the form of dynamic pricing has been seen with Amazon, who owns Whole Foods. They explain clearly that its based upon visitors but there is murkiness surrounding the secret Project Nessie and pricing surrounding that. Their food delivery/recurring subscription orders were seen adjusting prices by as much as %20 without notice.
Walmart also is one of the leading grocery stores in many localities and yes they do digital signage, but have yet to implement bait and switching tactics as of yet. That said, they may try there hand again at it when the regulations come down given their major competitors are doing this with little pushback due to a degradation of the rule of law and government in anti-trust enforcement.
These are hardly hypotheticals. There is a fundamental impossibility of separating a person's interest or need in a product, from a person's choice to buy a product at a given price prior to them actually doing it.
Here are some further resources for you to dig into.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/supply-chain/dynamic-pricing-fo...
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-xjxu3qxkuideg
Time is money. Convenience is money. Money greases the wheel of time.
They literally said this. The fact that you haven’t seen it yet just means they’re waiting till the technology is fully deployed before they start abusing you with it.
Have faith and have patience!
dtagames•7mo ago
The most logical use case, as the paper points out, is for discounting expiring or unsold merch, not marking things up.
With the proliferation of apps and websites with everyone's prices, stores are falling all over themselves trying to show they have a low price, not a higher one.
Besides, printing and throwing away millions of shelf tags is just wasteful.
UltraSane•7mo ago
bmandale•7mo ago