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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store.

Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.

So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.

Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.

Also, this law excludes loyalty programs and promotional offers, which seems to be the main way that groceries have engaged in dynamic pricing in reality -- the advertised price doesn't change, but they give certain people certain coupons. And of course, my parents were clipping coupons from newspapers decades ago, as richer people couldn't be bothered, whereas people trying to make ends meet was clip and save religiously.

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> Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout.

Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this.

> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.

> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”

https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...

The bill involved is HB 895. Maryland's online statutes have not been updated (yet) to include the new sections.

https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895E.pdf

The convention (among US state legislatures) is that existing language of statutes is in plain text, strikethrough is text to be removed and underlined is text to be added.

Seems not contradictory to say that it legally has to match what you pay, when that is the content of the lawsuit against them, implying that their actions are illegal. Many states also already impose a stiff additional penalty for this practice (e.g. item must be sold heavily discounted or given free to any consumer that observes that the price charged at checkout differs from a price posted in the store)

> Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this.

That's already illegal, as indicated by your link about the ongoing lawsuits.

Doesn't that depend on the state? I'm almost sure there are quite a few states that allow stores to charge a higher price at checkout than what the product is labeled with on the shelf.

That’s fraud, plain and simple. There are already laws against that. No more specific laws are needed.

Fraud: “a deliberate act of deception, misrepresentation, or concealment of material facts intended to gain an unauthorized benefit—typically money or property—while causing loss to another party.”

Isn't it common for state sales taxes to be added at the till? (I don't live in the US but that seemed to be what happened on my visits there)

Sales tax is a government imposed requirement that's not included in prices in the US, so there's no misrepresentation and no fraud. If that's what the commenter above was talking about, they're confused about what's being discussed.

But that's already illegal. And it's not dynamic pricing.

E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.

I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.

But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.

Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.

This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.

In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.

I think they're conflating/confusing a bunch of different things here. E-ink tags let stores run sales more often, offer "happy hour" time of day discounts, etc. It's not so much individualized (other than probably some demographic targeting, like raising prices 5-6 pm when well employed people are picking stuff up on the way home).

The personalized pricing is usually by having everyone pay through an app. The app knows your buying history and tracks everything you do so they can fine tune their deals for you, surfacing discounts on things that pull you into the store, running e-coupons when it knows you're price conscious, etc. etc.

Both systems are fair on the surface but exploit the asymmetry of billion dollar information systems vs the average consumer. All of these tweaks ensure they get the maximum amount of money that they can out of their customer base which means on average everyone ends up paying more, all while being very hard to point to exactly how you got screwed.

The economy requires companies to be mind readers to function optimally [0], which is impossible, so they choose the less invasive option of harvesting all your data.

[0] One of the core foundations of neoclassical economics is unbounded rationality which includes the ability to predict the future.

The UFCW's defense is that e-ink price tags "take away skilled work". I have no clue what intense high-ELO skill is required to stick a sticker onto a shelf, but I'm sure they can figure out how to stick an E-ink tag up instead and how to replace some batteries.

They just get rid of the prices on the shelves.

Nobody will shop there then. They've tested this and consumers will go elsewhere unless you're selling super luxury goods.

In my town of 100,000 people there are four options. A universally high priced grocery, a dirt cheap, goods at our near their sell by date with the expected low quality grocery, a gas station convenience store, or a bunch of mid-tier grocers with a few different names all owned by the same parent company.

Many places would dream of my "options".

Oh believe me. If that parent company was dumb enough to remove prices from items, and if that is even legal in your state, then a competitor would enter very quickly, making a big deal advertising about how it displays prices, and everyone would start doing their shopping at that competing mid-tier grocery store. Because that's how capitalism works.

You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that the current equilibrium of local stores will continue to persist once some of the stores make a deep and fundamental change to their business. That is obviously not the case. It would create a gigantic strategic opportunity for competitors. And competitors really like finding strategic opportunities where they can make a bunch of money now where they couldn't before.

Just show a barcode. Scan to reveal your personal price. Maybe bundle it with coupons to make people accept it easier.

This already exists at Target - scan each item as you put it in your card, and note the ones that are "cheaper when ordered online for in-store pickup" and complain at the register and get your discount.

Congratulations!

IME there usually isn't much contention looking at the same section of shelf. If I'm looking at the cured meats, I'm the only person looking at any shelves within 6ft either direction. Other nearby people are walking past, looking at shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, waiting for me to finish before checking the meats, etc. The algorithm doesn't have to optimize for literally every person/sale to still have a lot of impact.

They don't have to be that specific. They can look at you and the other customers in the store in aggregate, and raise/lower prices accordingly.

If you're poor and you're a in store full of millionaires, you'll end up paying millionaire prices, unless it's for an item the millionaires rarely buy.

> Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets.

Phones have been randomizing and rotating MAC addresses for a long time. With enough antenna arrays you could theoretically track an individual RF source through the store but you wouldn't be able to tie it to a returning customer or identity by itself.

The days of easy external phone tracking are long over.

Your scenario is more than just a software update and dotting some i's. Pulling this off would require a lot of hardware and compute.

The best you could do is force everyone to scan prices through their phone with an app registered to them. You probably won't have many customers left when everyone gets tired of pointing their phone at everything to see their custom price.

You're already watched by security cameras, it's not hard to do facial recognition anymore. And you have companies literally lining up to sell such facial recognition databases. It's conceivable they could determine what price you pay for groceries while your car is on the way to the store, thanks to Flock.

Disney Parks patented tracking via shoes and groups of people/families based on scanning their shoes upon park entry to build an index of guests. Not sure how and where it was all applied during park visits for guests but you're definitely correct that facial recognition upon store entry to kickoff a live dynamic profiling of a customer is what's currently being beta tested/deployed by some retailers.

Why would they need to do that when you are already wearing an RFID bracelet?

For individual discrimination (vs neighborhood or time of day), one way would be what Macdonalds does:

- raise all the prices

- have an app (with an account) to give personalized discounts

- use “AI” (or, just a regular program) to pick the optimal set of discounts per person, squeezing as much as you can out of them

As a person who can't help being cheap, I do use all the fast food apps, and hate the dog-slowness of each one of them. It has been really interesting though, to see immediately when someone at McD or Wendy's HQ turns the discounting knob. McDonalds turned theirs down (for me?? who knows?) years ago, and Wendy's (sometime last year?) abruptly curtailed what used to be a really worthwhile regime (often giving any of a small burger, a drink, or fries for free with purchase) to one that usually just gives $1 off an item.

> So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores.

Can't you just (in principle) use facial recognition cameras to determine who is approaching an item, calculate a "personalized" price and display it before they pick up the item, then make sure you match it at checkout? You could even use computer vision to only update price labels when people aren't looking at them, predict walking trajectories to pre-load prices and pre-resolve conflicts, and in ambiguous/low-confidence situations you could fall back on a default price.

This all sounds a bit like science fiction, but there is some prior art with Amazon's retail experiments, and it seems like this sort of thing is getting easier and cheaper all the time.

edit: some people have noted that you can have prices only visible viable via scanning qr codes, which makes this all much simpler. But I think you could do it with visible price labels too---you would lose some opportunities to jack up prices e.g. when multiple people are in close proximity to an item, but you could still profit in the (likely a majority of) situations where that's not the case.

> Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed.

That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.

Not fast food though. We have different expectations at different types of establishments

Fast food prices are pretty sticky. We consumers don’t like anything changing or being dynamic. But it is was a communications failure. If they slowly raised the prices then announced time based discounts, like how a happy hour works then it probably would have been fine. Sonic does this. But dynamic and surge pricing means I never know what it’s going to cost until I’m ordering. That’s obviously a stupid strategy for budget dining.

It wasn’t really interpreted as “cheaper than normal from this time to this time” but as “we’re increasing meal prices during rush hours, at our sole discretion, whenever we feel like it. Too bad if you paid $4.99 yesterday at the same time, today it’s $7.99 because more people are physically here.” Even if that wasn’t quite how it was going to work, that’s all anyone heard.

The difference is that early-bird pricing is transparent and predictable. There is a written, known policy of $X discount during specific hours. You can plan for it. It's never a surprise.

Dynamic pricing means sometimes you go there, and Wendy's decides on the fly whether you get a lower price and how much. It gives Wendy's the option to pinch pennies how they see fit for their own benefit, rather than offering a deal which you can choose to accept.

I can't tell if you're implying that Wendy's was going to offer different prices to different customers "on the fly", but that wasn't the case.

It was store-wide with updated prices shown clearly. Yes it could change on a daily basis, but you would also expect it to be roughly predictable because the whole point is to get more people to come in when it's cheaper.

Saying that Wendy's is "pinching pennies" doesn't make any sense.

So... you just apparate at Wendy's instantly without cost when you decide to go? Most of us aren't so lucky. We need to travel there, which takes time and resources. Sometimes we decide to go through the drive-through and there are 5 cars in front of us and soon 3 more behind us blocking us in. When prices are 20% higher than you expected when you finally get to order, do you leave and waste all that time? Do you pay 20% extra, giving them money for nothing? Economically, both of those options are losses.

(Yes, I understand that Wendy's claimed it was only ever going to be used for discounts. But frankly, I don't believe them. The temptation to increase prices is just too powerful to ignore for a profit-maximizing MBA.)

I'd begrudgingly pay the extra dollar and stop going for lunch

I genuinely don't know what you're talking about.

I mean, I go to a place like McDonald's probably once a week when I'm starving and it's convenient. Their prices change all the time. The item that had a big promotion last week no longer has one this week. On the other hand, there is a new item on the menu that has a big promotion this week. And because I went to a different McDonald's today than I did last week, the prices are all different anyways, often by as much as two dollars.

You seem to be assuming that fast food prices are already known and predictable when they're not. What you usually do is decide you're in the mood for Wendy's, go there, look at the different prices and different promotions and decide what will most satisfy you while being the cheapest. Maybe you were in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger but they have a promotion where double cheeseburgers are 40% off so you get that instead.

Why you are bringing in travel time doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. And the whole point of dynamic pricing is that they want it to be somewhat predictable, so you know that if you show up at 3:30 p.m. you're going to save a couple of bucks compared to if you show up at 12:15 p.m. Like, it's not rocket science to figure out at what times a restaurant is going to be less busy.

You've never had to budget tightly, then? When I was in college, I knew what my typical order at every restaurant near campus would cost me, to the cent. It was a big deal in how I planned my days. Something costing $1 more could blow my budget for the month - and did, a few times. I can't imagine how miserable it would have been trying to balance all the various factors if prices were basically randomized.

I know a fair number of people who still have to plan to that degree. It's not a foreign idea for them. It's their daily life.

They were wanting to charge more during the rush and not just give discounts. It was closer to Uber's surge pricing.

The use case that jumps out at me is long tail items and whales. Let’s say that you’re a wine store, and you have an assortment of nice Italian wines all priced at $40 (to make it tidy). You’ve priced them competitively to attract your Chianti drinkers to step up and splurge if it’s a special occasion. A customer walks in, and the system recognizes that’s it’s Giovanni Vinoamore. Giovanni only comes in twice a year, but when he does, he leaves with two dozen bottles of Brunello and Barolo. It automatically raises the price of all those $40 bottles to $50. In the moment, you don’t care if a Chianti drinker puts a bottle of Barolo back, because you’ll make way more than that off of Giovanni. Once Giovanni leaves, the prices return to $40.

But how do you do that without people noticing? If I pick up a $40 bottle of wine, and it's suddenly $50 when I hit the register, that's fraudulent pricing - you advertised one price when I picked up the project, but a different one because Giovanni is now in the shop.

This problem already exists in retail. Pricing algorithms are easy to run, and paper tags are difficult to change frequently or in bulk. Every store will honor the posted price, but within that there’s still a range of responses between “make the customer happy” and “the onus is on the customer to prove that the register price is incorrect.” Digital signage really tips the scales against the customers proving that the price is wrong, but I expect that most companies will adopt policies closer to the “make the customer happy” end of the spectrum. It’s not worth fighting about $10, especially if you both know they’re right.

Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone.

This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.

Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).

I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores.

It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores.

But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.

Here's an example (not mine): https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/...

I also saw this in a gas station convenience store near me but I did not take a photo. I haven't seen it in a real grocery store yet.

There's a store in my neighborhood that only does app purchases and a little robot brings it out to your car. It's nice getting cilantro that hasn't been picked over by a hundred people, but I don't like shopping for groceries online, and AFAIK you can't actually enter the store.

You see it a lot in "Convenience Stores" at gas stations now. I refuse to purchase anything like this.

So we’re now going to spend several hours at the grocery store, scanning every item and waiting for some app to come back with a custom price?

I think this would be illegal in many places. A number of states require prices to be visibly posted, and some also require unit price to be shown.

A lot of grocery stores allow ordering online for pickup or delivery.

The answer is loyalty programs. I wouldn't be surprised if many existing loyalty programs already violate this law in spirit. The customer is encouraged to scan their app, and offered personalized coupons. Anyone not participating pays the base (highest) price possible, and those who are price conscious get a tailored discount, which is not necessarily the same discount as their neighbor.

(As an added bonus, the data stream from the loyalty program is attractive to marketing teams. Want to not be tracked? Higher prices for you!)

Its probably easier these days for a customer to fight the checkout price than it would be for the store to implement surge pricing or whatever they want to do. Just take a timestamped photo of the price when you pluck the product off the shelf and compare it at the register. We could probably make an app that does all the calculating for you to verify and the only thing one would need to do is take a bunch of pictures as they shop, which is fairly trivial.

That sounds like a "fantastic" shopping experience. No thanks.

Its a much bigger problem on things like Amazon. My expectation is that Amazon would come under the provisions of this law if the buyer was in Maryland. One the most annoying things about Amazon is looking at different prices using a browser with no history and a VPN putting you in a different zip code, than the same product on your browser where they can see where you are coming from and know who you are.

Summary on the governor's site says it applies to 3rd party delivery services.

https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/Governor-Moor...

Everyone seems to be discussing physical, in-person shopping. Multiple stores near me do "Click'n'collect", where one picks out items online and just drives to the store to collect them (for example) on the way home from work

Surveillance pricing something like that, pretty much entirely online? I think we can all imagine how to set that up without too much trouble

If a grocery store raises shelf prices across the board to be able to give discounts to a few, it will likely to lose customer footfalls to stores that don't. Grocery globally is generally (except food deserts in high crime areas) is a hyper competitive business with very low margins. So preventing personalized price increases should be the policy priority.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the industry over the past decade. There are three major grocery "brands" in my city. All of them have the same parent company. Quitting one store to go to another is about as effective as the people who boycotted Bud Light by switching to Modelo.

Based on the headline I thought it was what grocery chains here in Norway do, where they have people hired to "shop" at a competitor while simultaneously noting prices on items. If they see the competitor has lowered the price of milk, they'll lower it to match.

Apparently they can do such adjustments multiple times a day back and forth.

Been some talk about banning that here.

"Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.

personally, I think grocery stores do it in reverse. They raise prices across the board, and lower them if you give them your data for a loyalty program.

Even though the price goes down, they adjust prices for you based on your personal data. You pay more if you don't give it up.

They remove the pricetags and replace them with a shopping ap able to track your habits and maximize your spending.

This already happens online. Try getting two people to book a vacation, one on a new iphone and one using an ancient android. Prices will differ.

That's basically an urban legend about vacation prices being different between iPhones and Android. It's not a thing.

A bunch of people claimed it happened to them and it sounded sinister and plausible so it's spread a lot on social media.

But there is no actual evidence of it and lots of people, including journalists, have tried to reproduce it and failed.

And the thing is, it's really easy to pull up a flight today on an old android and see a cheap fare, and then pull it up on your Mac a day later and see it's much more expensive, and not realize that the reason for the price difference is because the cheap seats sold out and only the expensive ones are left.

Facial recognition

https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...

How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display

> There’s hundreds of people in the store.

Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time.

> How will the can of peas know which price to display

People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time.

Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.

Midwest Walmarts, Meijer’s, Costco etc very often have hundreds of shoppers.

So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed? And that’s not going to cause a bunch of commotion and demands for price checks at the checkout?

> So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed?

I think the design of the system entails that the price you see and the price you pay would be the same. It's just that different customers are going to see different prices.

Then the question is how do they track you from the time you picked the item to the time you scan it. Which is what I was opining on.

> demands for price checks

What would that look like in modern commerce? There is no "big book" of prices. The best you can do is go back to the shelf and say the price is wrong.

Now you're debating which is the actual store price? The one on the shelf or the one on the computer? Stores are not generally obliged to honor mistaken prices although they may be in some states. Famously Arizona Iced tea is not actually 99c everywhere it's sold.

It's then a game of chicken and most consumers will probably lose.

If they profile all of the people in the store simultaneously, they can raise/lower prices based on time of day and item purchased. Then you won't see the prices changing constantly as people walk around the stores, they'll just change gradually throughout the day, when people aren't looking.

If all the people who work at Goldman Sachs next door to the store get off work at 6pm, the store can raise steak prices at 6pm while lowering the price of Oreos (or whatever). It doesn't even have to be based on economic class statistics, it can be tailored to the specific times when individual people shop at the store and which items they buy.

>"surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing")

For your consideration:

>"dynamic pricing" (which is just a friendlier-sounding synonym for "surveillance pricing")

Dynamic pricing and surveillance pricing are two different things, e.g. reduce price for fresh produce by x% 1 hour becore the store closes = dynamic pricing. Surveillance pricing is based on personal data of the individual customer (browser history etc.) which, when applied to groceries is basically everything Instacart does.

Is the weather forecast calling for significant snow accumulations? Increase bread prices.

That's how

'price listed is valid for the next 5 minutes' is how imagine enshittificaiton looking here.

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