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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

it's pricing based on your past (and current!) behavior

How will that work in a brick-and-mortar store where there is a price label on everything?

Coupons, upselling, personalized-proactive-ads. JC Penny showed people would rather pay MORE with a 70% discount than less with no discount. Jack up the price, get everyone to download your sh*tty little spyware app, and give everyone the thrill of "I got a free doodad!"

One business that's already great at this is Target. I've observed through personal experience, they will send a coupon for a really great price on items you normally buy like diapers or formula, if you have kids, to try to get you back in the store. They're not sending that diaper coupon to every customer.

The same way coupons work in drug stores already; there's a stated price and then there's the price with SuperSaver™ membership, which you have to pull out of their app and could be subject to any number of personalizations, real-time or not.

But both of those prices are always shown and you don't usually have to be a member of anything to get them as the clerk will just use the generic code. At most self checkouts there is an option for forgotten card which lets you bypass the need for an account.

> both of those prices are always shown

This isn't necessary. There could be a public price and a private price.

> there is an option for forgotten card which lets you bypass the need for an account

Neither is this.

There already are private prices -- the result of targeted coupons that certain customers get. Those coupons are tied to the SuperSaver(tm) account and aren't transferable.

Right, those won't go away. These offers will likely be in addition to those and because they're more targeted they will be higher value. CVS already has specific offers that you can only get in their app with your specific membership, Target uses their Circle membership to accomplish it.

The medium to deliver this customer experience are out there right now, but they're all working on adding signals to inform which offers you get.

Every time I check out at a Kroger store I tell the cashier that I would like to get a membership card. They don't require you to give a phone number until you register the card after the checkout - which I don't do because I already got the benefit of the card at checkout. This won't work at stores that require phone number first, and still leaves open credit card-based tracking - for that you actually lose the few % cash back if you want to use cash instead.

Every time I check out at Kroger (or similar membership-based store) I tell the cashier that I don't want a membership but I do want the listed sale price. They always just scan their own card.

CVS started to refuse to scan the 'house' card as of about a year ago. and they try to collect your phone number when they hand you a card for the first time.

I've had this work occasionally but often the opposite experience unfortunately.

Most of the time Jenny's phone number works xxx-867-5309. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny. Someone already registered it.

Digits of pi usually work too

Every time the item has a digital coupon advertised price I simply inform the cashier I don't a phone with me. They discount it immediately.

I don’t think any of those store cards actually require you to register them.

>Every time I check out at a Kroger store I tell the cashier that I would like to get a membership card.

Seems like a win for them. Now they can tell their investors that their loyalty program is super popular and constantly growing!

I've been using the same un-registered Smith's (Kroger by another name) card for 5 years now. I get gas points and everything. Now, do they know a lot about me based on my credit card? Yes, but it's a start...

I have one of those too.. but only used cash with it. I have heard that if you use that and a CC or debit card they link the data - even if just once - and can link the past data as well. I also have my wifi turned on my phone so they can't correlate the 'burner card' with that.. if I don't have cash I use a different discount card.

Of course if they scan the face and correlate that way - meh. For that reason I only use cash at Target - but not sure how long that will be enough to keep from data points being put together there or anywhere at this rate.

Ever seen the digital price tags at Kohl's? I can imagine a scenario where you walk in and the prices change!

More likely, though, it would be pricing things differently at stores based on demographics. Regional grocery store chains do this - We have Stop & Shop here in New England, and if I go to a store closer to an urban area, the prices are lower on some items and higher on other items.

Ever seen the digital price tags at Kohl's?

I am in Wales, we don't have such things here. I think I'd be reluctant to shop anywhere that did this. What would be the point of working hard to earn more money if all the prices went up around you so you were no better off than before?

Which is why they would never do that. They would instead start with high prices then bring them down, ie you "saved" money.

Companies use this data to raise the price of items that are mostly bought by people with a lower sensitivity to price.

A famous example is Tesco in the UK that worked out they could double the prices of certain cheeses with no impact on sales volume, because the people that bought those cheeses mostly bought the most expensive brands in other categories (they were probably higher income people).

I get a piece of mail from my local Meijer (midwest grocery/department store, think Walmart) every week on Thursday, a couple days before my grocery run on Saturday.

It contains about a dozen coupons for the exact items I typically buy:

- Store-brand milk, 2%

- Honey bunches of oats with almonds cereal

- Bone-in chicken breasts, family pack

- Noosa strawberry-rhubarb yogurt

- Old spice aluminum-free deodorant, if it's been a few weeks since my last purchase

etc. etc. etc. It's not the generic "all Pepsi/Nestle products on sale" mailers. It's the exact stuff I've bought in the past. And yes, I admit I'm a creature of habit. There's little $4/hour coupon clipping or recipe selection required (I hate that), I can pretty much shop my normal list and then swipe the coupons across the scanner. And tell you what, if I skip a week at Meijer and go to Trader Joe's instead, there's likely a few more coupons for a little deeper discount the next week.

It's more than a little creepy. I have no idea how they got my home address, maybe scanned from my driver's license when I bought alcohol? And I don't use a store membership, they must be just tying my debit card number to my shopping habits.

When I first got the personalized coupons I called Meijer and asked them who they bought my address from, they refused to answer.

If you use a credit card to pay and they datashare with another company where you used the same credit card to pay and the other company has your address, Meijer could have gotten it from them.

I have a walmart.com account - they add my in-store purchases to my Walmart.com history when I pay with a credit card I used at walmart.com.

The easiest is to send e-coupons to frequent shoppers?

At Safeway (supermarket chain across the Western US) they have a thing called "Just4U". It's a set of deals in your app that are only for you.

I imagine it would be similar to that.

Aren't there already some experimental stores where you have to scan an item with your phone in order to find out the price? If the app is linked to your identity, then you could see a different price than others based on your demographics and past purchasing behavior.

What about AR glasses with prices dropping for each individual the longer they stay in the store?

A digital label that shows price after looking at your face?

Seems simpler to send coupons for specific products to specific people.

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