Cashier: I’m going to have to cancel orders for so many damn items
Stocker: I’m going to have to reshelf so many damn items
Also stocker: I’m going to have to throw away so many damn items
Store management: I’m going to turn over so many damn employees
Rich Consumers: I’m going to have so much higher risk of food borne illnesses
Poor Consumers: I’m going to only be able to eat price stable staples (or just starve)
Store owner: I’m going to make slightly higher profits, so everyone’s a winner!
Also stocker: I’m going to have to throw away so many damn items
I noticed that the “50% OFF ENJOY TONIGHT” sections of my local stores now overflow with unsold bread every Thursday.
someone should kill these people
If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream
Nice grocery store you got there, be a real shame if it caught fire because it’s, uh, “hot outside”
No I won’t call the fire department, but I will allow you to rent the use of my phone for thirty thousand dollars
If that’s too much, it’ll be forty thousand in one minute. Surge pricing is a bitch, huh
edit: I know I said forty thousand when I handed you the phone but by the time you made the call the price had surged again to a hundred thousand. Don’t get mad at me, the algorithm did it.
Remember when they called inflation “greedflation” brother that’s just normal capitalism. This is the cost of business living in late capitalism.
These things will have to be wireless to be of any value. It’d be a shame if whatever bands they’re using were filled with garbage and noise so they couldn’t update.
“What, this? This is my emotional support RF jammer. It’s very important to me, so I will be wearing it while perusing your store.”
Taking a Flipper zero to the grocers and setting all the tags to fifty cents
You know what the hilariously fragile Rube Goldberg machinations of global capitalism needs to be more efficient?
Spot pricing on groceries!
Can’t wait to grab something only to have the price change by the time I get to the register
In the future, there will be lines of shopping assistants standing outside of stores. In exchange for a payment, they buy the items you need on your behalf so that the facial recognition doesn’t identify you as someone with frequent stomach aches and raise the price of Pepto-Bismol to $500/bottle.
Gosh sure would be a shame if someone hacked those and changed the price of an organic gallon of milk to $1.50.
or $.015
-$300, free money exploit
In practice the logistical load of price surging based on real-time data would just be too expensive to bother with, this is probably mostly about saving on paper costs and having to train people even less since an OTA update to pricing can be completely automated and roll over on a weekly basis
Wendy’s just hinted at the possibility of surge pricing and their sales tanked and idk how long it took them to recover, or if they have, at a certain point people just don’t have more money to spend, you can’t squeeze blood from a fucking stone
pricing can be completely automated
when that’s working there’s no reason they couldn’t do surge pricing. an infrastructure existing with only the prospect of modifying their pricing algorithms & updating it more frequently to enchance profitability.
you can’t squeeze blood from a fucking stone
you can bleed an awful lot from monopolized essential goods
You can’t make a profit from people who have no money to spend
this is just a basic contradiction of capital, obviously its true in the long term but capitalists will always pursue the road of maximum profit to the ends of a common ruin of the classes. they’re going to do surge pricing and all manner of new horrors if not restrained by a state or overthrown
- : “Is that a challenge?”
A whole lot more people will learn to sail the high Seas 🏴☠️
Other stores have already been doing surge pricing apparently. They just raise their prices and offer sales during slower periods.
My local supermarket has started to lower prices. Not on everything. And there’s still shrinkflation. But on many basics. I doubt they’re doing it to be kind. It’s likely because they reached the limit of customers’ overdrafts and their overall sales were dipping or because they’re trying to undercut the competition to drive them out of business.
The blood from a stone thing is really reaching a tipping point.
Me and my girlfriend haven’t gone out for a meal in over a year. I don’t know anybody who regularly goes to restaurants anymore and if they do it’s to see a live band and drink booze they brought from home in the parking lot.
At a certain point the people will theoretically just not have any money to spend and then no amount of business school wisdom is going to get somebody with $5 to pay $20 for a burger.
Mr. Evrart is helping me find my excuses for the lack of terror
How about to start you use it to actually add the sales tax to the price?! Always seems crazy to me you Americans have to figure that shit out for yourself.
I always assumed that was a deliberate business decision to drive anti-tax sentiment among consumers by charging more than the posted price.
so what the fuck is gonna happen when I pick up an item at one price and 15 mins later I go to check out and it’s $2 more
That shit’s gonna suck so bad for everyone involved lmao
Makes me want to do some first amendment auditor bullshit but for groceries, go around with a gopro and when they change the fucking prices on me I roll the tape showing I was advertised a different price
This is something the boomers could actually do to help. They can’t remember what they had for breakfast that morning but by god they will remember a ¢.02 difference between the price at the register and the price on the label.
The main argument for these is to avoid this exact problem with discrepancies between labels and the cash register. Introducing surge pricing would be a lot more bother than it is worth.
Introducing surge pricing would be a lot more bother than it is worth.
more bother for who though?
if it only bothers the minimum wage cashier and some budget-minded consumers, but it squeezes a few million more in profit out each year it’ll happen. There might be enough backlash to it to prevent it from taking off, but if they slow roll it cleverly I can see it happening
They are already overcharging compared to shelf prices, that is the very thing they’re introducing this to prevent in order to avoid bad publicity and legal costs in states where it is mandated that they should show the same price.
Also, the Walmart employee being yelled at isn’t an issue for them morally, but making people mad and also holding up lines is really not something to be desired. How much do you think they’d earn from this kind of surge pricing before they get flooded in lawsuits?
lawsuits idk, maybe there’s more law on this than I think
But inconveniencing customers? idk I think there are ways it could be pulled off without jamming up the checkout lines.
“Huh that’s not what the price tag said” dumps it on the ground
“Huh that’s not what thenprice tag said” *dumps it on the ground *
Yea I know this is “punishing minimum wage workers” in the short term but at a certain point there’s gotta be pushback on this shit.
Yea it’ll suck in the short term, hopefully all the grocery store workers start refusing to work anywhere this is a policy. Or better yet people would refuse to continue to shop anywhere this was a thing but hoping for Americans to consume less out of principle is the most useless plan maybe of all time.
It’s kind of like when I have to sit on hold for 30 minutes every month to figure out how my insurance company managed to fuck up me giving them $600 and getting nothing in return this month. I understand the person I’m talking to is just a worker but they chose to work for a company who’s company policy is to fuck over their customers, I have less sympathy than most especially if the employees attitude is anything short of “fuck these bullshit artist parasites”
Hopefully they at least follow gas station rules and can only change the price once a day
What would you have to pay if they changed the price tag in the time span between you pick something fun the shelf and you get to the register?
The ex-almost-a-lawyer in me thinks that posting a price tag next to an item in a store counts as giving a binding offer that stores will have to make good on. The cynical marxist in me thinks that big businesses will be allowed to fuck over normal people once more.
Imagine of normal people did this thing: “Here’s this month’s rent mr. Landlord! What do you say? It is only half of what we agreed to when I signed the lease? Oh, haven’t you heard, I have implemented algorithmically live-updated surge payments!”
I think it will be daily or bi daily adjustments like gasoline.
That’s what I think as well. Most likely just daily pricing updates for the exact legal reason SoyViking says.
I worked IT in grocery for a long time. The company I worked for was starting to sell these as I was leaving so I don’t know a lot of the behind the scenes talk anymore, but the general thought was just for it to be a replacement of the paper labels that they usually replace weekly anyway. Maintaining shelf labels is actually a huge pain in the ass.
The new norm will be pricing is final once it’s rung up, until then, it’s variable. The only other way I see it going is that these electronic labels fall into disrepair or they generally don’t function as intended, and then the store shifts back to paper labels to save money, but keep the surge pricing model.
Stores are going to have to replace these digital labels as they age I can’t imagine them lasting any longer than like four years.
- : “Sorry, [X] costs more now? Why is it expensive? Because I CAN charge that much!
: “Damn you, socialists! Your bad vibes made poor porky want more money!”
