The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.
“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.
Apps like Uber already use surge pricing, in which higher demand leads to higher prices in real time. Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently. Electronic shelf labels allow the same strategy to be applied at grocery stores, but are not the only reason why retailers may make the switch.
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“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”
Dude actually said that out loud. Wild. Teach me how to give that little of a fuck.
You know what the world needs? Surge pricing on water.
–No one, ever.
I’m sure Nestle has already thought of that.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to charge people more when they’re willing to pay more because they’re literally dying of thirst.
Or some such bullshit.
I just gotta say tho, Fuck Phil; no cap.
Did I use it right?
Yes you did, I’m proud of you
So dumb. Could have said just ice cream and the message would carry better
And the said that it’s a good thing.
Capitalism is a disease.
This is gonna suck for restockers when a lot of items get left at the cashier’s because Walmarts ghouls decided to raise the price between shelf and checkout.
While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.
“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”
Rather than seeing an opportunity to use surge pricing, Gallino says retailers are likely drawn to electronic shelf tags to ensure consistency between online and in-store pricing.
This person must live on another planet.
Sure, the prices won’t be changing every six seconds, but anyone with half a mind can see these tags won’t be used only when stock or expiry are a factor. The prices will be up on the weekend to start. Then later it’ll be changing through the day to get higher prices between 4:00-7:00 when people are getting off work.
The arguments of no longer needing people to do yet another menial task and increasing utility of labels for consumers both have merit, but this alien even says the primary factor:
“The bottom line … is the calculation of the amount of labor that they’re going to save by incorporating this."
So this is being sold a certain way, as a tech advancement that takes advantage of “surge” pricing, as if retailers are adopting the latest tech and profitability schemes. And in fact, wrt a huge company like Walmart that operates on wafer-thin margins scaled up to mass consumption quantities, I don’t doubt this will have some effect.
But the fact is, these chains already had extremely dynamic pricing schemes, and would change many prices daily or at least weekly; its just they had employees walking around who manually scanned the items and replaced the labels. When I worked at a box retailer we had 3-5 people where this was their only job. And i didnt work at a place with half as many skus as walmart. So the real savings is in the value of the labor the company will cut from implementing these smart shelf labels.
The initial investment will seem quite high, but businesses split up their capital investments over 10-30 years. So despite the hype, and even the predatory valance on the philosophy of the tech itself, in fact this technology, just like most technical advancement, is to automate the tasks of workers and eliminate their jobs. Profit is made from stealing from workers.
a huge company like Walmart that operates on wafer-thin margins
Walmart has historically run enormously wide margins, thanks to their “import shoddy crap from overseas” business strategy.
They’re vertically integrated so I doubt the stores themselves are making all of that profit. But you’re right, they’re very profitable as a company I was only thinking about the stores. especially since they handle every transaction from the moment its hits our shores to the moment it leaves the stores, accumulating little markups along the way as it’s passed from legally separate business to business, the warehouses are a different company from the trucking and logistics, as well as the stores; all owned by the parent co. But the store’s profits probably aren’t much higher percentage than any other box retailer or grocery store.
So Walmart can easily raise the price while an item is in your shopping cart? Pick up a $6 bag of Cheetos and pay $8 at the self serve checkout.
Three thirsty people walk out of the desert, one at a time, and walk up to a water salesman. The first has $1, the second has $10, and the third has $100. What should the salesman charge in order to maximize profit while keeping all the customers happy?
$1 sounds reasonable, if their are other water salesmen it would probably be the best price, but it leave a lot of money on the table.
$10 sounds good, since 2/3s of the customers will get water and the saleman gets 600% more money.
$100 is the price that gets the most money, but leaves 2/3s thirsty and is way above what you should charge for water.
The answer, strangely, breaks the notion of “fair”. Let us pretend that these three bottles of water are the only sale this salesman will ever make, quitting the business right afterwards. Also, let us say that none of the three will ever see the other two people’s transactions. The answer then is to charge the first man $1, the second $10, and the third $100. Everyone gets water and the salesman gets the maximum amount of money. The problem is that we, subconsciously, feel that this is ‘unfair’ even though everyone got what they wanted. The ethical would set it at $1 while the businessmen would set it at $100 while trying to drive everyone else out of business. But what if the rich could be charged more than the poor? What if sales were based off of what each individual was willing to pay instead of which fixed price would garner the most profit?
Would this be a better world or a worse one?
The answer then is to charge the first man $1, the second $10, and the third $100.
Would the ethical answer not be $0, on the grounds that all individuals are entitled to basic living needs regardless of their personal wealth?
For whatever reason people are always wandering out of this damn twilight zone desert, so you set up a filtered tap to offer for free, funded by bottle sales to the bougie bastards who’ll pay $10 or $100 just to flex.
Yes, that maximizes happiness at the expense profit, the polar opposite of setting it at $100 to maximize profit at the expense of happiness.
Yeah that thought experiment is so capitalist-brained that the person doesn’t even seem to understand your issue with the premise as a whole. That it’s ridiculous to put so much consideration into thought experiments about maximizing profits while selling water in the desert.
Then they respond to this as if you just gave a legitimate response to their thought experiment, and that you wouldn’t be heckled by a room full of MBA students if you said what you just said in the marketing class the original commenter likely heard it.
Alright, so I quite literally haven’t stepped foot into Walmart since June of 2015. The only money I’ve given them since was for two grocery pick-ups during early COVID when it was in a 5% cashback category on my CC. I have no idea of what changes have been made in the physical stores since then, and this sounds … Horrifying. What happens if the price changes before you check out? I would feel duped. Are they going to make you “check in” when you enter so they can give you the price at time of entry? Or are you SOL if you don’t make it to the cash register in time? And wouldn’t that extra rush to get out make them lose money on stuff you pick up wandering around? Or maybe they want you in and out as fast as possible. What a clusterfuck.
I do love telling people about my Walmart-less living when it suits the conversation, and 90% of the time they are shocked, absolutely flabbergasted. “How can you do that?! Where do you get all of your stuff?!?” Well, like many middling American cities home to at least 20,000 people, there is a Target, Walgreens, a regional grocery store, Maurices, and for some reason like 12 auto parts stores right down the street. I can’t recall anything in Walmart, aside from exclusive clothing brands (if you can call them that), that I haven’t found elsewhere in at least some quantity-per-package. I get that people want a one-and-done shopping experience, but besides my routine Aldi stops, I don’t shop that much anymore, even online.
My reasons? I would like to say that I am boycotting them for paying shit wages, being viciously anti-union, and all the other ethical shortcomings that never seem to improve. And that definitely is a part of it. But the main reason, the one setting me on my path toward Walmart Recovery (I should start up a Wal-Anon) was from the experience I had the night I needed to buy a broom, my last night or day in that store.
It was somewhere between 11 and 1 am (definitely after 11) and I had just moved house into a… House. (I was in an apartment previously.) The place needed a serious cleaning, and I simply did not have the correct broom for the job. Picked out the broom and a few other cleaning things, all was well. But shortly before checking out, a group of rowdy youngsters in their late teens sidled by me, laughing about something while also eyeballing my cart with the broom and other boring household accoutrements. I was but 23. I guess I hadn’t shaken the adolescent anxiety of feeling judged about appearances and actions at that point, but the thought that these slightly younger peers were making fun of my broom shopping was too much to bear.
“Oh my gawd, who buys a broom on a Friday night?? Get a life, ya loser.”
“I did. I did get a life! I’m moving on up, bitches! I went from a 500 sqft apartment to an 800 sqft house with fuckin windows on all sides! I can put plants in every room, every nook and tiny-ass cranny! And I can bring my cat! And if that damn house of mine needs a broom at midnight, then my gods, I am going to go out and fucking GET ONE.”
Anyway, that’s my story about how I broke up with Walmart. DM me for requests to join Wal-Anon, we have plenty of seats for everybody! (The room will be free of any and all Mainstays furnishings and the coffee will be served sans Great Value cups, I assure you.)
I hope this means that there won’t be any more junk mail bullshit adverts in my mailbox trying to get me to go to their stores- since they’ll change prices on a whim- there’s no need for them any more.
Hahaha unlikely
I never imagined there’s be a fucking Happy Hour at goddamn Wal-Mart.
Never been in a supermarket when they put the reduced price stickers out?
Turns all our local pensioners from Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later.
I’m sure there’ll be:
- a lawsuit
- local news coverage
- a statement from some high up congressperson
- a statement from the president “come on!”
- a lengthy and expensive congressional investigation with the heads of the big three food stores where they’ll ask them if they know how facebook works
- a convoluted bill passed that is based on the rolling average price creep over x consecutive hours that’s so confusing everyone just gives up and pays the surge price or starves as America tries as hard as possible to third-world our ass until Putin’s Russia (or North Korea or whatever) looks like the Promised Land by comparison (Reverse Babylon AD?)
If goods get more volatile in price maybe crypto could actually be useful for commerce. “This box of pasta went up 30% before I got to checkout, but Bitcoin is up 50% in the same time frame so it’s okay.”
So that’s what people think crypto is like.
Now imagine if that bitcoin went down 50% in the same time frame.
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If it’s hot outside we can raise the price of water…”
Holy fuck dude that’s some endgame capitalism right there.
It’s the rollercoaster tycoon umbrella strat all over again
Is it price gouging if there is a heat advisory is my question, and how enforceable is that. For water it’s just cruel, especially in places with little access to drinkable tap water.
The fucked up thing is that it’ll have to get legislated. Like there will be a bill that says you can’t price gouge on water in a heat advisory.
And the more fucked up thing is that it’ll be controversial.
And then you realize that this is why we can’t have nice things. We can’t all just play nice together on our own, no, as much as we all claim to hate daddy government, we need him to come down and remind us that shit like this is anti-human and start defining rules that really should have just been common decency in the first place.
Like how I feel when I tell my younger kid to stop throwing forks in the house. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. I told you yesterday, and the day before. And I told you three times today to stop throwing things. And then I get forked in the arse.
Yes. That is actually the point. MUST maximize that profit!
Airlines do this now, as does Uber.
The tech is only just catching up for retail. This is end game capitalism hope you enjoyed the ride.
They really will just fuck us to death if we let them.
name checks out
One dose of capitalism please.
It’s Walmart. They are one of the scummiest around. They nickel and dime everything and everyone.
Always has been. Do you know the story of Jacob and Esau and the cost of a lentil stew for a starving brother?
My answer to Walmart’s greed is… Some of us don’t buy bottled water, so feel free to raise it to $100 a bottle.
right, but some people do, and by encouraging this, you’re fucking over your fellow humans.
edit: There are also situations where you don’t have a choice but to buy water bottles. maybe you’re out of your home, your personal bottle is empty, and it’s hot out. maybe you’re at the airport. sure you could drink from water fountains, but what if they’re nowhere near you? or what if they don’t work?
Also if you live in, say, Flint, MI, you have reason not to trust the tap water.
The next town over from me, if you wash a white shirt in the washing machine it comes out with a tint of brown. We drink bottled water.
I supposed it depends on the country, but as far as I know in most of Europe you can just enter a coffee shop or the local equivalent and ask for a glass of tap water.
Mind you, even though I bought a metal water bottle years ago and almost never buy bottled water nowadays, as you say sometimes it happens that one needs, though its rare and it’s highly unlikely I would be going to a supermarket to buy water.
oh, Europe, yeah that makes sense. see I live in bumfuck America where they’ll tell you to get fucked and then shoot your kid
Water is free/cheap though. They have a water fountain. You have plumbing into your living space with a virtually limitless supply.
So what if you placed some water in your cart, walked around and then they raise the price before you check out? How does that work?
They’re going to end up with a bunch of people complaining to the manager about the price not matching the sign, which already happens, but it’ll be 10x worse.
Good. Annoy the managers until they get rid of this shit
The thing that sucks is that the managers aren’t going to be the ones with the power to do that. Then again, all of my managers were spineless as fuck when I worked in a grocery store (literally never had employees’ backs), so they’ll probably just do an override on the price anyway.
Managers like that suck. When I was a manager in retail whenever I made a choice that may have agreed with or disagreed with one of my Team’s opinions or choices I always stopped to explain my reasoning and sought to make sure they understood. Taught my whole team how to deal with shit without needing me present, though I also reminded them that the instant it became too much they were to call me up.
No one fucks with my crew. Though I also knew the best thing I could do for them was stand in front only when I needed to, not every time if they wanted to handle it.
I wish they’d all been more like you. Instead, all of the ones I had until my mid 20s were the kind of people who would tell us the policy was X and we absolutely could not do Y, and the second a customer bitched, suddenly Y was fine and they made us look like liars or idiots.
The pricing decisions will be made above the manager’s pay-grade.
They’ll price check it and find the new price. The customer will be blamed.
There are laws in many states governing many items clearly articulating that the price cannot change during business hours/within a business day.
Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.
Shall we okay a game of “guess which shit hole states don’t have this”?
Hopefully the FTC revs up it’s engines like it’s been doing.
That depends on who is in charge of the country at any given time. Three-letter entities have a way of being hamstrung during conservative administrations.
The next time conservatives have control, though, it will likely be permanent. The FTC would certainly be dismantled.
There are laws in many states
For now…
Then you pour it out at the checkout and walk out without paying.
Just wait until they track your phone in the stores and tie it to demographics like where you live and profession to build a financial profile to estimate how much you are able to pay. As you walk down aisles, the prices change to your price to gouge out every possible penny from you.
The true cyberpunk dystopia. They ultimately want to keep you as close to destitute without actually being bankrupt as possible, that way they extract as much as possible from you at all times for as long as they can.
Capitalism will always try to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.
I can see this happening 100%. It’s already kind of a thing in home renovation and construction. Some businesses will charge you a higher hourly labor rate if your materials are expensive. Installing tile or whatever should be the same labor rate, but they assume customers buying expensive materials “must be rich” and won’t blink at paying more for labor, too. They don’t all do this, of course, but it’s something to watch out for (and one of many reasons you should always get multiple estimates from different contractors).
Expensive tile tends to be fragile, and its assumed the customer will expect more precise work, so not a great analogy
Tile was just an example. Applies to paint and everything else. I will use the contractor who doesn’t do this upcharging nonsense. If you want to pay more for no reason, you do you!
Sounds like a market to pay people to shop for you.
But don’t pay them too much.
Ideally, we should trust one large company to manage paying them as little as possible for us. Probably through an app, so they can slurp up data on us to decide how much we’d pay for the service
This as exactly my thought. It’s not crazy to imagine this when I know for a fact systems exist in supermarkets to calculate optimal prices in different stores, based on the size of the store, the demographics of the area it’s in etc
This is just a great opportunity for a poor person to rent their phone out, you gotta look for the silver lining in the capitalism!
Time to design a phone faraday cage for grocery shopping.
It might be possible to make an open-source app that causes your phone to spit out a different ID that is optimized for the lowest prices, triggering an adblocker-style arms race.
I’ve got two phones, one for the walmart and one for the hoes.
Goddammit, will the hoes be using similarly advanced pricing technology?!
Et tu, Cinnamon? Et tu?
Both Apple and Android randomize MAC addresses now, so the easiest form of tracking is already dead.
I like the idea of cloing “low prices” identifiers, but you would need an inside man letting thr app know what those are, and at that point the Corpos could also get that info.
Im sure these systems try various other fingerprinting. The most likely is the apps they all push on you for discounts and curbside pickup now. They likely have location data/etc all turned on and tracking, along with your all your purchaing data to micro target you.
I’d expect “kill all radio signals” to be the most direct answer that they can’t hack around. The old ways are sometimes best.
