Kroger and Walmart deny 'surge pricing' after adopting digital price tags | Hacker News Reader

Kroger and Walmart deny 'surge pricing' after adopting digital price tags

nytimes.com

26 pointsbookofjoe22 comments

So if they aren't using these things for "evil" (my editorializing), then surely they won't mind some regulation banning the use of these things for evil? Perhaps they're not allowed to raise prices more than once per day? That's not a complete regulation, but you get the idea....

> not allowed to raise prices more than once per day

They can still do surge pricing if the raise it once (and lower it once) per day.

The idea was that we don't have to ban use of the tags, but can regulate when prices are allowed to be adjusted. This is simple enough of a regulation that it stands a chance of being enacted, and additionally might actually work if written carefully. You basically just have to say that electronic price adjustment must follow the existing patterns for manual price adjustment. I think that could work out pretty well.

https://archive.ph/ZIOFK

A Planet Money about dynamic pricing in grocery stores[0]. The Norwegian chain in the story had a reasonable policy where prices were only allowed to fall during the day. I suspect the American model would be significantly worse for consumers.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-gr...

When is the price set? When I pick it up the time or when I check out? Would it be legal if I pick up an item that's marked $1 and at checkout it's now marked $5? What if I hold said item and give it to someone else, what would be the price?

Except that in all the breathless excitement about dynamic pricing they literally said “on a hot day we could raise the price of water” which is what gouging is. And it’s illegal.

What's wrong in surge pricing (aka dynamic pricing)? Isn't all pricing dynamic and based on supply and demand? This is just changing the frequency of the price update.

It’s great to be on hacker news and be part of American society that doesn’t have to worry about finances the same way the majority of country does but for everybody else, surge/dynamic pricing means you don’t know whether you’re gonna be able to complete your grocery run and what compromises you need to make. Companies need to take on setting prices long term based on what the analysts and supply chain experts deem suitable like they always have.

Aren’t these already concerns now? A store could raise the price before you arrive and you’d be stuck with that price or need to go to another store.

I think a world where the price tag can change, automatically, as you walk up to it, because you are walking up to it, is pretty god damned awful. I would like to avoid that world.

so you grab one of everything surrounding your target product you wish to buy and ditch everything else at the endcap. they gonna change the price of a popular product in the store 3 other people grabbed at a lower price at the same time in store?

if they are going to game digital prices, they can be gamed back as well, no?

There are easier solutions to this problem than trying to win a rigged race.

This seems a bit sensationalist.

...why? Between facial recognition, RFID tagging of individual items in stores, digital app tracking of purchase history and specific location in stores (yes, they absolutely do this, through running apps plus your WiFi MAC address, though this has gotten harder in recent years), facial recognition, and credit card number purchase correlation... dynamic pricing for individual customers in retail stores is absolutely the goal. Or at least a goal.

All of the above is real. I'm not making any piece of it up, and I'm sure there's more. I've actually been part of bids to do pieces of it. (My conscience did not like this. We lost anyway, which might actually be a bad thing, because my company probably wouldn't have executed very well....)

You’re assuming the price goes up as you approach, but it could equally go down - the whole point of “coupons” is to charge people more if they value time higher than money, and lower prices to those who value money more than time (usually lower income people). All other things being equal, a store would like more money, but raising prices reduces amount sold after the store already bought it and paid for it to be displayed, increasing the chance it is eventually wasted. You might find that stores regularly lower prices significantly towards the end of the day, or just for poorer customers, in order to reduce wastage. For those calling for regulation, the assumption is always that our analysis is so complete and obviously correct that regulation is justified - is there a reason we couldn’t actually wait and see if there are problems before trying to “solve” them?

We shouldn't wait and see because it is clearly going to cause issues for the people who are already in a precarious state.

Stores already regularly lower prices at the end of the day without this.

I do think regulating this would be good, but I don’t believe that’s currently possible.

All of the packages for a single product share the same barcode, so they can’t be priced per customer. Yet, anyways.

Isn't that kind of what airline websites do ? Your first visit is the lowest price you will see.

It would mostly be a profit increase at the cost of people earning lower wages on average as they usually have less choice on when & where they do their grocery shopping.

Is it legal? Probably, but it would still make things worse or at least inconvenient for almost everyone including you.

What’s wrong with surge pricing food, a substance known to be inelastic because people need it to survive, from a grocery store?

Is that what you’re asking?

It's "just" changing it to a frequency that is far faster than people can plan their lives around.

When you don't have much money you know what you can afford food wise as you get round the shop, we are going to put much more stress on people who are already stressed.

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