Senate: Kroger's new AI pricing scheme is 'corporate greed out of control' | Hacker News Reader

Senate: Kroger's new AI pricing scheme is 'corporate greed out of control'

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43 pointsajdude19 comments

> Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera

Those are stores that I'll never set foot in again. It's a shame that Kroger has purchased half of the stores in my area. Let's hope the other half doesn't get on board with this sort of abuse.

Does it help to know that this sort of face-rec customer demographic scraping has been widespread for at least a decade. Themodels hace gotten more accurate and cheaper, and it's only going to get worse.

Personally, I don't care that much about the demographic scraping until you try to change the price some individual pays based on their demographic instead of determine something like how the market losses of a higher price for everyone compares to the profits.

Before this idea, I think there was an indirect and less effective way to do this with loyalty cards, and I'm not really sure they should be legal.

This also has the potential to exploit the cultural leaning and internal decision making patterns influenced by individuals and change the marketing and price of products in specific areas to exploit them for maximum profit, people form less resourced communities will have difficulty recognizing they are being targeting and there will be less backlash since it will not be recognized, in addition they could claim they did not know about this despite having models and testing out their hypothesis on people from those communities by offering them a pitance which they do not know about and after rolling it out in a few stores it's success will be replacted in the stores in other states, it's not racism for racisms sake it's money does not fucking matter which community it is and their are studies for different communities too for immigrant communities of different kinds, latinos etc. As for the difference in prices bullshit reasons will be made up like transportation and labor costs with the help of accountants just in case it is asked and changes in marketing will be attributed to the people who made the marketing and the data scientist and the team who did this will erase their work such that they do not have the research but they have the "experience" to this for other product categories.

Gross.

I cant for the life of me understand how it can be legal to charge one demographic more than the others.

It sounds normal when we're talking about things like "Lady's Night" where ladies get free entry or discounted menu items. That's a relatively common and normalized deal in my area.

If you think for one second they are going to do "students night" where students can actually afford to eat... instead of milk every last cent of extra profit from every eye twitch and craving glare then you have no idea how capitalism works

They already make it close to free for college kids. They are big on investing in self checkout and very much unwant to hire anyone but the cheapest and most apathetic guard they can find. As a result, savvy college students learn before long that they can ring up the bulk meat as onions to no consequence.

While I dont condone the concept that one group should pay more that the others based on thier identity, I do recognize that there is a concept of "lady's night".

One thing about that though in many cases the ladies end up being part of the product. Lady's nights are typically not a thing for thier benefit or in recognition that women often get paid less. The idea is that a lady's night brings in more paying men who anticipate that there will be more women at the bar.

In other news, Kroger is also known for not paying their workers very well: https://www.fastcompany.com/91149866/i-have-coworkers-barely...

They're really trying hard to get people to avoid their stores! Some companies really hate doing business for some reason.

Imagine being a shopper working for Instacart/Doordash going into one of these stores and seeing absolutely bonkers real-time prices. Or otherwise Them gaming the system by sending specific shoppers in to buy specific goods that they get for cheap compared to others. Oh, the world we’re entering into!

Identity based pricing. Surely this is illegal.

I wouldn't be surprised if online retailers like Amazon already do this.

I personally haven't noticed Amazon doing this. I check nearly every amazon purchase against camelcamelcamel[0] before buying and the price I'm shown always matches the price the camel shows.

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

Legal or not, there's no indication that anybody is actually doing what they describe. It sounds more like an election year attempt to attribute middle class concerns (grocery prices) on abstract boogeymen (Big Tech, AI).

AFAICT, Kroger's system can highlight deals on the shelf if you're using their app, but that's essentially the same as using a loyalty card.

Honestly some of the hypotheticals they present in the letter indicate a questionable understanding of the grocery industry, like raising prices on turkeys before Thanksgiving.

“It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?”

As long as it's only used by people who opt into that sort of thing, I'm good with it. Being spied on, no. And doubly no if stores are using their ill-gotten data gains in order to target offers or adjust pricing for me.

I really think we've entered an age of hypercapitalism:

- this price-surging is a good example

- companies raising prices because they can and blaming inflation

- corporation buying up housing to rent out

- small investors/flippers buying up homes to put $10-25k of "improvements" (vinyl flooring, new paint, new MDF cabinets, quartz not granite countertops, cut down trees, etc) then jacking the price $100-300K

- apartments illegally using price collusion, they are in somewhat trouble but will just do things manually if need be to raise rent as much as they can

- apartments adding as much as they can for fees - required cable television service, required trash valet, etc...

We are living in the modern version of the Gilded Age. Corporatism and greed have gone so far out of control that they posing a serious threat to those of us who are neither large corporate entities or absurdly wealthy.

#1 - People who haven't read The Grapes of Wrath recently (or ever) really should pick it up again.

#2 - While it is still possible, people need to put effort into getting food freedom laws passed.

https://ij.org/issues/economic-liberty/homemade-food/

https://civileats.com/2022/08/20/two-states-right-to-garden-...

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