Dynamic Pricing at Major Grocery Chain Can Vary Prices Depending on Your Income | Hacker News Reader

Dynamic Pricing at Major Grocery Chain Can Vary Prices Depending on Your Income

nysun.com

24 pointspmx27 comments

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Title: Major Grocery Chain

Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the US. (excludes department stores, drugstores, and general retail)

Kroger, which is considering a significant expansion through a $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons

Albertsons is the second largest supermarket chain in the US.

Note that this excludes Walmart and Costco, which are usually considered the #1 and #2 in grocery.

Oh no, the rich might pay more relative to their income! Disaster!

But seriously this will punish the salary rich but not the asset rich - the real type of rich.

>the rich might pay more relative to their income! Disaster!

And the benefit (other than corporate profits) would be? Aside that, prices varying according to gender and age sound like a lawsuit prime feature.

Absolutely nothing should be tied to income. If it is we remove any incentive to succeed or excel. Everyone becomes nothing

Fines should be.

Road tax.

Well said, bootlicker

Why stop at groceries? Make everything variably priced. Vary the prices enough so that no matter how much or little you work, in the end everyone's costs (and wealth) are equal. Da komrade!

This article is conflating digital pricing labels with dynamic pricing. Not saying dynamic pricing could never happen, but it is not happeing now as the article says.

I'm not sure dynamic pricing could happen at a grocery store. For their online sales sure but in-person the digital labels show a price and that price needs to match what it does at the register [1] [2]. What are they going to do? Kick everybody out of the store for 30 minutes while they up all the prices?

> Ms. Warren highlighted on social media how digital pricing could enable stores to implement surge pricing, such as increasing the cost of water or ice cream during hot weather or raising turkey prices before Thanksgiving.

The example from the article doesn't even require digital pricing. The weather is a fairly known event day-to-day and the calender even more-so.

As somebody who hoards way to many receipts; prices have been going up even at stores with paper prices (which is like all that I've ever seen).

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/buyer-beware-watchin... [2]: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/consumer-protection/prici....

They actually do this in Norway. The prices can only go down during the day and reset the next day. They even hire price spotters to watch the prices at competitor chains.

Why would the register not be relying on the same database as the digital labels? This is how it works at lots of stores in the UK which have digital labels varying the prices day-to-day.

I mean there's a bunch of why's. The real world is pretty imperfect.

But anyways, if you add the item to your cart when it's say $1.40 and it becomes $4.40 by the time you get to the register that seems double-non-plus.

this example is trivially solvable

doesn't sound trivial to me, could you give me examples how?

In many countries laws tell that customers cannot be charged more than the price displayed on the label. If the price was X when customers put an item from a shelf to a trolley but synchronously increased on the label and in the database to 2X while a customer was on a way to a till he’ll be asked to pay 2X which may not be legal but even if it is it would cause a backlash.

in some countries maybe, I think in some US states? I don't think that is standard though.

This scenario is easily avoided though, change prices once per day, or you could change prices when the store or aisle is empty.

I've seen some backlash where folks would abandon cart at the till, or ask to remove the item and leave it there at least, causing quite some chaos/delays overall. And that's just user error/misreading a label. Pretty sure if pricing is unpredictable between displays and the till often enough, people will just go shop elsewhere and/or regulation would eventually be created if it doesn't already exist...

The other thing is for folks who can afford to pay more, I'm not sure they even look at the prices on the shelves. I assume they may rather look at the end total and only check individual items if the end bill is abnormally high, in which case if everything was upped a little based on profiling, it might not be noticed unless googled or compared to another store?

I guess those behaviours may not be correlated to income, but all in all I have a hard time imagining this system resulting in either tiny optimizations that may be profitable in agregate or a net loss of clients/sales if it is too noticeable...

That's not how I read it:

“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 and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf.”

Then in the next paragraph:

“EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer … quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag—a corporate profiteering capability that would be impossible using a mere paper price tag,” they wrote.

That's exactly dynamic pricing save that the driver is not external factors (weather, proximity to Thanksgiving) and the price is not universal. It's adjusting the displayed price of an item based on the identity of the person looking at it to target a specific price to an identified consumer. A very fine-grained value of 'dynamic'.

It was this line here that says dynamic pricing is happening now, but other sources say only the digital labels have been deployed.

>Since its introduction in 2018, Kroger’s dynamic pricing strategy has expanded to 500 of its nearly 3,000 stores.

That's not what they're actually doing though. It's what two senators up for re-election this year claim they could do.

OK fair.

So many questions...

- What happens when shopping is done by a delivery service? Does everything bought by a door-dasher get priced higher (because they might spend $5000/week at a store doing grocery runs) or lower (because their W-2 is lower?)

- What happens if I'm buy groceries for my grandmother? She's aged, has poor mobility, and on a fixed income. Are you going to charge me, and therefore her, more?

Taking it as read that they're not actually doing individualized pricing based on looks...

Delivery services let you add your loyalty/discount card to your account, which the shopper just scans off their phone and then pays with the service provided payment card. So they're still giving you your special pricing and still getting your data in return.

And that's assuming Kroger's in-house delivery service wasn't available. They obviously can do whatever they want with that.

https://archive.is/0GQh2

Good to know which stores to never go into again. Setting price based on identity is the dystopian future nobody wants. Vote with your feet. Never, ever, ever tolerate this shit.

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