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

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

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

  • geekworking@lemmy.world
    71·
    5 months ago

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

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
      411·
      5 months ago

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

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

    • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      5 months ago

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

      • Steve@startrek.website
        82·
        5 months ago

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

        • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

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

        • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

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

    • krelvar@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 months ago

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

    • jpeps@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 months ago

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

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
          3·
          5 months ago

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

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

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

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