Should be against the law to change the price after the shop opens at something like a grocery store. Nobody should be able to shop anywhere where the price you pick it up at can change by the time you get to the checkout.
Edit: Maybe there could be some exception for mid day price changes if you emptied the entire store of customers first, but enforcing something like that seems difficult.
They do that anyway, but usually prices going down.
e.g. yellow stickers going on things that will expire soon.
You’ve not lived if you haven’t watched two pensioners fight to the death over a 20p pack of Greek yoghurt.
That’s a little different.
Items that can expire get marked down at some point during the day, but they aren’t changing the normal price of the item. If there’s 20 packs of chicken breasts on the shelf, 5 or 6 might get the sticker.
There’s no guarantee that the one you have would have even gotten a sticker, and if you’re savvy enough, you might have intentionally chosen the pack with the
earliestmost recent packed on date, or gone late enough to be after the mark down time near the end of the day (at least where I am)They aren’t just going up and marking down the main price on everything, and its also always down, never up.
Issue is that haggling is actually legal in many countries.
So at the cashier they will make you an offer, which, if you pay, accept.
Now with technical support making individual offers becomes pretty easy and effordless on their end, but if you are in a hurry you don’t have that technical support to make a counter offer that effordless… So the shopper is at an disadvantage. Either way, your reaction, wherever you buy or not will train the AI of the store to extract the maximum amount of money of the broad customer base. If some people are priced out of living, they probably don’t care.
Haggling might be fine but they have to honor price tags.
If I’m in a grocery store and I see $1.00 they can’t change it and try to charge me $1.10, and when I object and say it was $1.00 it shows $1.10 now.
Well… In Germany apparently they can.
The price tag is not binding, it is a mere price suggestion. The final price is the one when you actually buy it at the checkout.
This is why american taxes had me confused when over there… it says $1.00 on the pricetag, so how can they tell me a different price at the register??
The price of the item hasn’t changed, it’s just that they didn’t include tax in the price. Yes, it’s stupid.
Abandoned grocery carts full of food might also be coming to my local supermarket.
Do cost accounting and play fair. Will we be doing this short-change shit forever?
Is anybody acting like this is new? Shops relabel stuff with price changes regularly, this just makes it quicker and easier - staff don’t have to run around for a hour with a price gun and a bunch of shelf labels any more.
Improving how we display prices isn’t the issue, that’s a good move, it’s how prices are decided that are the problem.
This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.
How would that work? I go to a shop and I know the price of what they are selling. It is not so easy to rapidly change prices without people noticing. There may be variations on vegetables, fish and meat according to availability but everything else has a clear price. Some products do have some seasonality or good and bad years but when I go to the shop I’ll mostly be accounting for those. It would be quite strange to go to the shop one day and buy something for 5€, the following time for 6€ and another time for 4€. You see, if I know this system is in place I will just not buy it whenever it is at an higher price. Moreover, changing prices while shopping is probably illegal. I am not sure about this, but I believe in Europe large shops are obligated to clearly state the price for every product. By changing the price several times per hour I do not think that would comply with such regulations. While personalised pricing itself may be legal, and I’m not sure it is, changing the stated prices while people are shopping probably isn’t. Besides, when I check out how will they charge me? This is 6€, no it was 5€ yesterday, you see the price changed to 6 while you were walking in front of it but it now is at 4€.
Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.
Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw
And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/
Well but r/n you can’t adjust the price of butter 3x a day.
(maybe you can but it’s stuff u don’t see. With this tech, I’d be worried they’ll change the price multiple times a day to minimize my wallet)
I agree that the technology isn’t the problem here. It’s the corporate mentality of trying to squeeze customers for all they are worth on a personal basis that is the big issue. That and surge pricing should be made illegal. Having to pay more for a thing just because a flock of other people decide to get it at the same time you do is absurd.
Already here in Canada.
I hate to be THAT GUY, but I have seen it used to discount stock close to expiry dates. It does not mean the prices always go up.
I’ve already sent feedback to Walmart about my refusal to buy anything with a digital price tag. The thing is, I believe them when they say that prices are only updated between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. The problem is that that policy could change literally any time.
Walmart has every inch of their store covered in cameras. They have facial recognition systems so they know who I am the moment I walk in the store. They know I buy graham crackers. They know I’ve put up with price increases in the past. What is preventing them from adding $0.10 to those graham crackers’ price tag the moment I walk down the crackers aisle? Literally nothing. They could, and that’s reason enough for me to boycott
The fact that the other guy who buys the same crackers, but they know they have to give a $0.10 discount so that he’ll buy a beer with it, is also walking down the same aisle. That is likely what would prevent them.
Personally I have been boycotting Walmart for over 15 years because they refuse to hire most of their employees full time so as to dodge having to provide mandated health insurance and they have a long history of completely screwing the lives of people who use their automated check out system.
Couldn’t pay me to shop at their horrible stores. FUCK Walmart and FUCK the Walton family who’ve become billionaires off the back of poor people in America.
Yeah, my problem is that I’m too poor to shop elsewhere. So far my local Kroger is only a little more expensive, but at least I know that everyone is paying $8.49 for that six pack of graham crackers
Unfortunately that is by design. Walmart actively works to close down local stores and corners the market on wholesalers to control the price so they are the lowest price in any area. Only ones that can usually stand up to them or places like Aldi.
If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we’ll just have to start dynamic shopping.
Don’t you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?
It’s weird, the higher the prices get, the worse my memory and aptitude with self service checkouts gets.
My local store can not even get a reliable source of staple foods (the distributor often shorts them milk, meat or whatever), there is no way this:
A) Works
B) Is adopted by any non large store
C) Is accepted as anything but a hated cash grab
I’ve already seen them in several stores near me, including Walmart. The entire store was switched over to them.
these gonna get hacked…
Hacking a pricetag would do fk all, just leads to more people scanning it and getting a shock at the higher actual price.
Someone could hack it to make all the prices $1000, no one would know the prices and then ultimately probably not buy anything.
I will buy that for a dollar. (no really lettuce for a $1 is worth the hack)
What’s the common way for updating these? I have some similar devices that use Wi-Fi but local stores seem to use some sort of nearby transmitter pointex towards the shelves, maybe infrared/optical
It will probably be wifi and mqtt. You don’t need a whole OS to get mqtt, just a TCP/IP stack.
Possibly it will use BTLE or BT5. If the store is large enough it might make sense for staff to go around with android app and manually update some prices, in which case BT5 in SPP mode might make sense.
probably they set certain times of day where there will be surge pricing, like around 12-1pm where more people come in for lunch, and around 4-5pmish where people off work.
Or they could charge a customer more if they know the customer always buys the same product.
How so they propose changing an e-ink shelf label per customer??
Probably more timed towards certain times and demographics, but yeah it just takes a couple seconds to update and there are plenty of customers running “loyalty points apps”
If this happens, I will absolutely try to figure out how to game it
Bring items to self checkout. Scans as fast as possible. Walks out with a 20% dynamic discount.
Great, I have a very bad feeling about this, given the possible crisis of 2026.
Man would really suck if internet cuts out to get updates when its at the lowest prices…
Portland banned it for housing. Time to ban it for everything else!
