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Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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....)

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