Hacker News Reader

Comment by uncertainrhymes | Hacker News Reader

The big chains that do this in Europe are very clear that prices never go up during the day, and generally everything bulk updates at night. Baked goods get cheaper towards the end of the day, for example. The linked Planet Money episode in the article covers it nicely.

But sure, once you enable the capability, it won't be long before we are living in the inevitable grim meathook future.

View on HN

How long until you grab something that has a price of $5 and it's already $7 by the time you get to checkout?

We need better pricing laws. Already, half the gas stations I go to don't have any price tags at all. And of the stores that do have price tags, none include sales tax.

That's when I get into the habit of photographing price labels while I put items in my cart, and upon finding a discrepancy, abandoning the entire cart full of goods for an employee to return. Make it costly for the company.

Sure make it costly for the company that already pays the employee peanuts when some dickhead leaves a cart full of groceries to spite upper management. Sounds like a fantastic strategy…

Sure, they pay peanuts, but on an hourly basis. Because what I'm not gonna do is do somebody else's unionized work for free.

Photographing the price labels and then comparing each one during checkout for a big trolly of groceries? Spending an extra hour to make sure you weren’t overcharged $3? Assuming your time has a nonzero value (I’m not sure of that actually), it sounds like this is costly for YOU

Plenty of people do this already by memory, if they're the ones that do the shopping regularly and are familiar with pricing. Several times I've told the cashier that an item was on sale or a different price than advertised and not reflected on the ticket. It didn't take an hour, it took less than 5 minutes.

No, I'm not spending an hour on verification; what are you, a government contractor or something?

I've already got my phone out, because that's where I stick my shopping list sticky note. I already watch prices and frequently catch mistakes at the till. But I trust that the paper price tag won't change, so I just tell the cashier their system overcharged me and they fix it. Occasionally I'm hit with an unexpectedly large bill and spend an extra 30 seconds or so to figure out what's going on (the answer is usually cheese).

But if they change to electronic price tags, you bet your ass I'm gonna spend that extra few seconds per item so I have evidence on hand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com