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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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.

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