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ive worked in a store that had that
it was so much time saved, compared to running around and replacing paper/stickers
And sure they COULD change the prices on random “whims” but they’d get a ton of angry customers. imagine grabbing an item for 5 bucks on the shelf, then when you get to the checkout, the price is 10?
our system only updated the prices at night
Not only a time saver so employees can actually be available to help customers and restock shelves, but also so much less waste created. I worked for a company that had paper tags a long time ago and we threw away so much trash every week for price changes, sometimes daily. Even if the prices didn’t change, we still had to print and put out updated tags because of expiration dates. I often would wish we had digital tags.
The amount of trash not being wasted is amazing.
Ah yes, the surge pricing only updates every 24 hours. This makes it acceptable
Well, i dont know about the rules in america
Great news for the workers who don’t get laid off as a result.
Where I live, having a price be different at checkout would actually be illegal (thank legislation), but they could still change it overnight. But they can already do that anyways…
almost as if it requires zero human labor! I wonder if labor cost savings will happen? Think of the profit margins right there for the taking! Certainly this benefits the worker, yes? The one that isn’t laid off, sure.
Is there some law saying that the price on the sticker must be honoured? I know some of them are unauthenticated protocols and you can change them with a flipper or some random CC1101 gadget
Mass has a law stating the lowest advertised price must be honored. (Which includes in store price tags, which are required for grocery items.)
Theres also a sort of bounty system baked in- if an item scans higher, than lowest price, youre entitled to one for free/ 10$ off, setting a ceiling for the discount, (i say one because you dont get to clear out the shelf for free on a miss-mark. But my mom has, for instance, run into a friend at the grocery, who found a missprice, and was telling everyone to grab a jar of pasta sauce before she checked out because its free if you grabbed it before they fix the sign. When we went to check out, there were like 50 people claiming the free jar, and some porridge manager trying to keep up with the discounts.
Theres also a hefty punishment for not honoring that Freebie. Punishment can iirc include up to 30 in jail for staff who refused. The investigation is probably the worst though- weights and measures can and apparently will shut down a groccer for up 30 days to investigate for refusing to honor the missmark.
So here, I dont think youd see a store trying to use dynamic pricing as a short term thing (probably reset the price daily before opening though) The risk of someone documenting the price change with their phone would likely outweigh the reward of anything shorter term.
As to the flipper scenario, seems like a bad idea- the store would most likely be able to pull up logs from their price changing systems, proving they never gave that price, leaving you having just tried to defraud a government agency with your report.
You’d be better off forging a price tag, photographing it in situ at an analog store, then getting rid of it. Less direct evidence of you commiting fraud.
Seems like a high risk low reward crime. Defrauding the government / hacking charges for at max $10s
There is in my country
Though its written like:
If theres unclear pricing, like 2 prices, customers get the better deal
Ah yes those poor (checks notes) price sticker changing workers.
Choose your adventure:
- Yeah, fuck them, not everyone needs to eat, right?
- I’m sure grocery prices will lower when these poor price sticker changing workers get laid off, thus benefiting us all.
Companies being shitty with price and time saving is not the same as keeping around pointless jobs that could be done more efficiently.
it was so much time saved, compared to running around and replacing paper/stickers
It’s right there in the original comment. If it saves a significant amount of time, it reduces the overall labour burden on the workers, meaning it’s likely they will require fewer workers to complete a night’s shift (restocking,
price updates, cleaning, etc.) with no real benefit to the workers considering cost savings will just be hoovered up by corporate.The benefit to the worker I not having to waste their time with doing something that could be done better, the issue is how the company responds, not the actual “work” itself going away.
The idiotic arguments I see every time jobs are automated away is just “less jobs bad”, yes in our capitalistic system where companies are insentivized the way they are I understand not having a job is worse then having one where you do stupid busy work, however that in itself is a stupid reason to bemoan any efficiency or time saving gains by actually useful technology uses.
I am a hard worker and I like to find ways to be more efficient and optimize my time spent on tasks, things like this are exactly that in theory.
That doesn’t benefit the worker at all though. It is an overall detriment to the worker class as a whole.
In this case, no one is saying “less jobs bad”. They’re saying the hording of savings from job elimination is further increasing wealth disparity, shifting money from the worker class to that of the elite. It’s not like the workers’ salaries will go up or the cost of goods will go down as a result.
I’m all for eliminating useless busy work, but the rewards of that should be reaped by those doing the actual damn work. Assuming you work for some company and not for yourself, all that time you put into being more efficient and optimal does is makes your employer more money and gives you a dopamine hit for being told you’re a good boy.
It does, as it’s one less manual thing they need to do.
You’re making exactly the argument I’m talking about, efficiency gains bad because companies always look to cut people when efficiency improves rather then investing back into their people because number must go up and shareholder value and yada yada capitalism shit.
At the lowest level, we should be happy when things are made easier or more efficient as that means we can spend less time on it and therefore should be able to now use that time for something better.
What do you want? People still working in the fields or mines at the scale they used to? It literally does not make sense. What we need is either socialism or extremely strong social benefits systems for people whose jobs are no longer relevant, its not like they got enjoyment out of those things in the first place a majority of the time it’s just to make ends meet.
What we need is either socialism or extremely strong social benefits systems
This is exactly what was implied by my previous comments. I already told you flat out that I’m for eliminating useless busy work. Why would you assume I want “people still working in the fields or mines at the scale they used to?”
Sheesh.
Ehh, I used to work retail and do signage for my department. The amount of time spent on signage in a day wouldn’t have noticeably changed the bottom line. The extra 30 minutes we would have gained per department would have been spent on cleaning and restocking. When one person staffs your department at open, it’s not like you can go to zero because they don’t need to change price tags.
Fucking the customer and protecting them against mislabeled prices are the real wins there.
What changed the bottom line is having to pay employees to do it. I also used to work retail, and if you never had to do this, then you could probably have a least one less person on per shift
we already had 1 person on that shift, this one doesn’t go to zero.
I’m sure Walmart only has one person working at a time
In jewelry before open… yup.
And if you implement surge pricing, we can shop elsewhere en masse.
Pelted with garbage? This should get you life in prison.
I propose a slightly more French solution.
Can we compromise and sentence them to life in a tiny cage in town square so we can still pelt them with garbage?
I mean, they do this kind of stuff anyway, just in broader strokes.
Ice cream is a classic example of something that’s always on offer in the middle of winter because it’s less in demand
Theres a difference between $3 -> $4 over the course of a few months and $3 -> $10 because of a sudden heat wave.
Walmart should be collectivized
I mean it could be a precursor for that but where I live some stores have had them for over half a decade without surge pricing. But who knows
Every time I’ve worked with a customer wanting to do digital pricing labels, the end goal is what we would now call surge or adaptive pricing
Like I said, maybe it’ll happen but we have digital price stickers in almost every store because they’re just easier. Same convenience allows surge pricing but surge pricing isn’t the only reason to do it.
They’re probably doing it and you don’t notice.
It would be actual news here so you’d need someone to notice. Me, any other consumer, their workers…
I get the conspiratorial idea but I very much doubt they’ve managed to keep it secret from everyone. I’d be happy (so to speak) to be proven wrong.
If there are no laws explicitly preventing the practice then all companies who can do it are doing it.
It’d be kinda surprising since no store has been known to do it so far, so nobody has noticed or talked. And some people watch the prices and their fluctuation like hawks. Not to mention the employees.
I get the pessimistic view but I just don’t believe that myself. But like I said, (un)happy to be proven wrong though.
Just curious where you live? You may be in a more honest place.
The actual circumstances where surge pricing would be worth doing are pretty uncommon. Like, what news item would make a manager think “Oh, I should double the price of jeans for the next four hours” or “No one will care if the price of eggs is 50% higher between 7am and 11am”. Price changes longer than that, or less frequent than weekly are just price changes, and digital tags just make it happen faster, more reliably, and with less labor.
Do you think that’s how surge pricing works on apps like Uber? There’s a human watching the market and constantly making adjustments?
Or do you think it’s computerized (or nowadays, probably AI)? Which do you think is more likely?
Doesn’t matter. You still need some condition to trigger price changes. No grocery is going to change the price of bread based on the wheat futures market, because no consumer cares about wheat futures. Maybe they’d change based on their own inventory, but they can’t do that too quickly, or the price will change between the time customer picks up the product and the clerk rings it up.
There’s a whole population of people who shop in advance - visit web sites, check the store fliers, whatever - to get the best price. If a shelf price doesn’t match their researched price, they’re never going to that store again.
Aside from gas stations, grocery stores seem to have the most volatile pricing. They’re already making weekly changes on dozens of items, probably based on purchasing algorithms. Maybe that counts as retail “surge” pricing, but it’s not the dynamics that people fear when talking about digital price tags.
Just because it’s not happening constantly everywhere, doesn’t mean that it isn’t being tested some places, and isn’t coming soon.
It also doesn’t mean that it is.
They track all purchases, and that means data they can feed into an algorithm to track typical hourly/weekly/monthly demand. If they know eggs are more in demand by X% between 7am and 11am then it certainly makes sense to charge Y% more during that time. It’s all just math.
Makes sense from a profit standpoint, you mean? Because it certainly doesn’t make sense from a standpoint of prudence, morality, ethics, community, or common sense.
Welcome to 2026. It’s been this way for a while now.
Even if that’s not the goal of the current management, it’s only a matter of time before they get replaced by someone else and there’s far far more assholes in this world than good people, so it’s all but guaranteed that at some point someone will use the tech for surge pricing and adaptive pricing
How do you know, are you personally tracking the prices of all items at every place with these tags?
I do keep track of how much things cost, yeah? I thought everyone did that. But also, kinda interesting if nobody else has noticed it either, because it would be legit newsworthy thing here if someone took up surge pricing
Everything? You pay attention to the prices of every item at every store around you? OK
Interesting you’d think every single person would have to pay attention to every single product to notice surge pricing. But it’s just one of those things that yeah, someone would notice and it would actually be newsworthy for someone to start doing that here. They’d be the first to bringing in an immediately hated practise.
But hey, maybe you’re right and they’re managed to do it without anyone knowing. You never know I guess. I just don’t believe that.
No. But in order to say, with as much certainty and conviction as you have, that it is not happening at all ever, you would.
No I wouldn’t personally have to follow every single price. Others are watching prices too, that’s just normal stuff. Not to mention the people who actually work at these stores.
What’s more likely in your opinion, that they have managed to introduce this new controversial pricing scheme without people finding out, not even their own workers, or that they’ve just not done it? I don’t know man, sounds unlikely to me.
Without anything to support it it’s just one of those conspiracy theories.
You seem to be assuming that we’re talking about massive shifts in prices, not changes of a few cents here and there to test the waters.
I have literally several years worth of notebooks full of what items costed at various locations. Paper shopping list, write the price down of the item on that specific trip at that location.
Started so I could compare costco prices to Walmart to local grocer because size and sales aren’t always guarantees of best price. My local grocer in particular often charges extra for the bulk version.
You aren’t the first to suggest this crazy but I was at one point feeding enough children that this mattered. I was using pricing to determine final cost of each meal and would drop meals in a out of rotation based purely on cost.
This was also a fun teaching opportunity, make the kids mentally add up all the prices with multiplers and coupons and try to see who gets closest to the actual total. Also to always do the math to determine per unit price whole accounting for sales and coupons.
Most of them are adults now but I still have a mental model around pricing. It’s also how I know prices have increased by 50-150%, cpi and other stats be damned.
Walmart “we’re noticing a large increase in theft of the products we’re trying to gouge people on, strange.”
Soon to be Walmart “People keep stealing out etags because I told homeless people they have rare metals inside, oops”.
If you are paying the Waltons for fucking bottled water in the first place, you kinda deserve to get gouged.
Which billionaire should we buy water from? There are only like a dozen companies that own everything.
“municipal water company”. They sell water for about half a cent per liter.
I understand where you’re coming from, as I too hate the Waltons, but food deserts are increasingly a thing in the United States and I’d wager tens of millions of people don’t have a whole lot of choice.
And this is 100% something that should be illegal, but never will be in this capitalist hellscape.
Go into Mal-Wart, fill your water bottles from their tap, leave without spending money there. I’ve only ever bought one thing at a Mal-Wart because I couldn’t find it anywhere else
Everyday I’m one step closer to becoming Johnny Silverhand.
reminds me of the old total recall movie, where they were charging for breathable air.
What price is the water in hell?
Shop at your locally-owned grocery store, if possible.
If a store has electronic price tags, or no price tags, I outright leave.
Electric price tags, no price tags, items locked in a cabinet without a person right there, no cashiers, a line 40 deep for the self-checkout.
Why ever would people order things online rather than go into a store?
