Colorado House passes bill to limit surveillance pricing and wage setting
coloradonewsline.com
coloradonewsline.com
He does not think this is is just selling it further? Oh no, it might prohibit software automatically determining my wages, how could we even have a society if we don't let computers figure out the least they can pay me without me quitting.
One of the frontrunners for the governorship is just spouting straight antisemitic garbage: https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/gop-gubernatoria...
Edit: He withdrew this morning and is running for the GOP chair now.
Bobert is quiet these days but I'm sure she'll ramp up after her primary closes.
The various school boards are perennial sources of my idiocy. My (former) board would go into public meetings and just openly and freely admit to crimes.
The county commissioners in DougCo recently decided to fine the victims of shoplifting from r not reporting it. No, you didn't read that wrong.
So, in summary, the GOP and many, but not all, of their state level membership aren't really sending their best these days.
Suppose you are an employer and you have 5 junior engineers. You wish to promote one to senior engineer, which includes a move to a higher pay band. How do you decide which one gets the promotion?
Most companies are going to decide which one to promote at least partly based on performance data. Do they consistently finish things on time? What is the defect rate in their work? Do they work well with others? Do they need a lot of help compared to their peers or are the who their peers turn to when the peers need help? Does their work show skill above what would normally be found in junior engineer work?
From what has been quoted by or about the objects that one representative had it is that he thinks the bill has been written too broadly and could be construed as prohibiting using job performance data like that in deciding promotions.
Enforcing it is another question though and you're right that companies will likely just accept the fine. It's all the more reason why this sort of thing needs to aggressively be legislated against and denied.
I still don't understand how they think we're going to change UPC pricing live per-person in the physical retail environment. Does the price tag change depending who looks at it? What if two people look at it at the same time? They obviously both can't be surveillance priced at that moment. The UFCW is mad they don't understand they can re-skill the worker that was trained to stick little paper labels up that they can now maintain pricetag batteries and hardware instead.
But have me an idea: for whatever reason, a person consistently gets lower prices, and offers to be your shopper. You end up paying less for groceries than you would if you went, but you have to pay your shopper. So pretty much same outcome, BUT, you didn't have to do the shopping
There are a lot of positive outcomes from this technology: more revenue in the pocket of the family who own's Canada's biggest grocer & REIT, and a deeper relationship with the neighbourhood vagabonds for me.
and -at least in this article- the consequences seem noticeably missing
EDIT: Althought the article does not include it, the bill (linked from the article) does.
The attorney general or a district attorney may bring a civil action on behalf of the state against a person that violates the prohibition against individualized price or wage setting based on surveillance data to seek the imposition of civil penalties. In addition, a person aggrieved by a violation of the prohibition specified in the bill may bring a civil action on behalf of themself or a group of similarly situated persons to restrain further violations and to recover damages, costs, and reasonable attorney fees. A violation of the prohibition against individualized price setting or individualized wage setting is a deceptive trade practice under the "Colorado Consumer Protection Act".
The theory behind capitalism requires people to take into account what they know when making decisions.
Suppose you have a business where many customers expect to be able to try the product before committing to buy it so the cost of paying for shipping for "free returns" has to be incorporated into the advertised price. Then you notice that a subset of customers have a better idea of what they want and never trouble you with returns, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
That's capitalism working the way it's supposed to. The customers who consume fewer resources get to pay lower prices. But it's the thing this bill prohibits, isn't it?
And for that matter, the customer would have enough information to know the quality of the product before purchasing, but that is often not possible.
If you try to sell "return insurance" then some customers don't buy it but end up wanting to return it anyway and then leave you a bad review for not having free returns. That costs you more than charging somewhat higher prices and having free returns, so that's what you do instead. But now efficiency requires some other mechanism of allowing the people who don't do excessive returns to pay a lower price.
Also, suppose you actually did sell return insurance. Then you notice that a subset of the customers who buy return insurance rarely use it, so you want to give them a discount to try to get more of their business.
They’ll buy your entire life from a data broker and charge you more because yesterday you accidentally viewed some Lamborghini seat covers. They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12. They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
You're describing incompetence. You're not actually rich just because you viewed something by accident which means you're not actually price-insensitive and they just lost the sale to someone else. That has nothing to do with algorithms, incompetent companies put themselves at a disadvantage and make fewer sales than other companies all else equal, and the ones that are sufficiently bad at it go bust.
> They’ll calculate that you have less willpower on Thursday nights and change their advertised price from $10 to ON SALE $2 off $12.
They do that regardless of whether it's Thursday.
> They’ll just do coincidentally use the same algorithm to determine their price as all the other stores do so they don’t have to worry about competing on price.
This again has nothing to do with algorithms. They can do the same thing by just looking at the prices other merchants are charging and setting the same ones, and if you really want to prevent this then the law you want is the one that prohibits manufacturers from enforcing "no sales below MSRP" against retailers.
Because in a market with a large number of retailers, the individual retailers all have the incentive to defect from a price fixing scheme, because increasing your market share from 0.5% to 20% by having the lowest price when those other idiots are refusing to compete on price is worth way more than having slightly better margins. This is why it's important that the number of competitors be large instead of small. Laws should be directed to ensuring that rather than trying to micromanage a consolidated market full of incumbents so large they can buy the government anyway.
What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Price fixing by software is a real thing. I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/will-targets-dynamic-prici...
https://www.fastsimon.com/ecommerce-wiki/personalization/dyn...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/personalized-pricing-ha...
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
The thing where you get a discount for making a below-average number of returns is also dynamic personalized pricing.
> Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
High-end stores are often selling more than just the product. Some people put a premium on buying from a place they trust not to carry low-quality products so they can save time needing to exclude those themselves, or to not provide them with a counterfeit or not make returns a hassle if there's something wrong with it when they get home. I mean how would you explain anyone buying from them otherwise?
> For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores.
It's pretty obvious why they do this. It's more expensive to keep stock at a retail store with premium downtown real estate than a rural warehouse, but if you do then you'll get sales from customers who want to see the product before they buy it or who want to get it today instead of waiting for it to be shipped. So stores have to charge higher prices than websites to cover their higher costs.
Which creates a problem for a company that has both a store and a website. If they charge higher prices on their website than other websites, customers shopping at home will use another website. If they charge lower prices on their website, customers will come use the store as a showroom or take advantage of same-day store pickup but buy the product on their phone while in the store to get the website price, using the store without paying the higher costs of having a store. This is already putting many retail stores out of business because people will use the store as a showroom and then buy the same product on their phone from whatever website has the lowest price, but at least then the store has the advantage that you can walk out of there with the product instead of waiting for shipping.
Now, is raising the website price while you're in the store a good way to fix this? Maybe not, because it kind of pisses off the customers once someone figures it out and you get bad press. But that's the argument that they don't benefit from doing it, which is no reason to ban it. You don't have to punish companies for things the market will punish them for itself. Whereas if it's actually effective to help them keep the store open so that people continue to have a showroom and same-day pickup, why are we trying to stop this again?
> Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
The fun thing about attempting to fix prices is that it's illegal regardless of whether it's effective. It's completely possible to net lose money by withholding units from the market to the net benefit of the landlords not using the same software, while simultaneously causing legal problems for yourself.
It turns out that "a fool and his money are soon parted" also applies to companies.
> You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.
The reason those things are taught in Econ 101 is that in the common case that's what happens. Competitive markets actually benefit customers.
The primary things you need from the government are a) to prohibit anti-competitive acts so that competition actually exists, b) to punish fraud and c) to price externalities imposed on people who aren't party to the transaction (e.g. environmental pollution).
You generally don't need (or want) the government to prohibit companies in a competitive market from doing things customers could avoid by just patronizing someone else. If many customers with 100+ options are knowingly choosing one you think they shouldn't, it's more often because they're getting something out of it than because the government is smarter and less corrupt than everyone else.
Anyway, suffice to say that I disagree about the desirability of these techniques and the ability of the market to straighten things out.
"Everybody does this and it's not actually bad" was the starting point.
I don’t think that is unreasonable.
Were you trying to make a point there?
Why pay? Clearly not because some people may own garages and they may or not store their cars in them. Most people load their garages up with so much shit a car doesn't have a prayer of fitting anyways.
Given the recent exposure of how token usage and limits have somehow gone through the roof in the past few months reinforces this point.
The solution is to use reasonable efforts to block Colorado residents if you can’t comply with the law. That’s a tradeoff a group of people are allowed to make for themselves.
We don't really want small companies to have to start blocking people in other states by default. That's not great for interstate competition.