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Comment by thebeardisred | Hacker News Reader

You're also forgetting the ability for stores to execute "surge" pricing.

I'm not a fan of it, but that will certainly recoup that cost much faster.

How do you handle the case where a shopper picked up an item at a certain price but by the time they got to the cash register it had changed?

Charge the lower price at the register for 2 hours after changing the display price?

Only change the prices over night? (but unlike with employees you can reprice the entire store every night without any particular cost)

easy, you just display both prices with a fat title 'Hurry up! Price will be 25% higher in 12 minutes"

If this doesn't exist already, it will soon.

This seems like a bad idea. If I own a physical store and you’re in it I don’t want to encourage you to leave quickly. I want you in there as long as possible putting things in your cart.

wouldn't this encourage people to buy fewer items?

But customers are so used to confusing pricing labels you could just make the old (cheaper) price say: "Discount: $x".

Also if you hook up the change to motion detectors where you know no one is in the aisle, then you can skip it altogether.

Could maybe be solved by adding some more technology (e.g. a barcode) that allows them to reserve the item at the current price, plus maybe some other kind of incentive.

The customer probably won't notice and if they do they'll walk back to the place they found the item and find the e-ink price tag has a price that matches the till. If they some how dispute it further the business will just lie like a rug until a particularly pernicious customer takes pictures of the price tag and then argues with the manager.

The eventual outcome will possibly be a class action law suit and in a few years the customers can sign up to receive a gift card.

You can see similar behavior with the same company here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaws-25-gift-card-class-...

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