It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:
Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:
- sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
- stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.
What law? In what country?
Australia, the country the article is talking about. That was a quote from the ACCC website.
Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.
Dynamic sounds way more fun!
I will institute my own "dynamic pricing" scheme if this ever happens
They already do that, just not as frequently. They change price tags of items every day by hand
Right? This isn't a question of if, more like how often
I’m still not clear on exactly what triggers this. Is it phone location, because a phone number is linked to all your data (unless you’ve been gaming it for the last 5-10yrs)? Do I walk by with my phone and the price goes up?
Is it like goodwill? Does the price change as you’re checking out? Do I grab a 2lb bag of medium roast coffee beans for $13, and because buying it consistently for decades, it’s now $18 at checkout? But is still $13 for the guy behind me who decided to try whole bean over pre-ground?
If rich people turn off their phones before hitting the parking lot and poor people leave theirs on, does the entire store get cheaper?
If you take a pic with your phone of the “advertised” price does that mitigate sudden increases while checking out, if you’re even watching?
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
What are the triggers?
We've had them for quite some time. They don't change price for individual customers, I don't think they change the price in the middle of the day either. But, I guess, they can change the prices just before opening, like if the wether service forecasts a rainy day they could rise the price of umbrellas and raincoats. Cold? Hot chocolate and soups. Hot? Ice cream and cold drinks. Certain asshole died overnight? Champaign and confetti cannons through the roof. And so on...
Oh, you mean price gouging
Oh, no no no. It's called "capitalism". Supply and demand pricing at it's finest! /s
They don't currently, but they could.
Take brand x on the shelf. Sold for $5 at a profit of $1. They sell 10 per week. You buy 2 if those every week, on Wednesday at about 6pm. Why not make them $5.50 next Wednesday and see what happens. Normal price on other days as no pattern identified.
Then once that's successful, why not have beacons detecting your phone, or even the stores app feeding your location. Then they can update just for the hours you are there.
Oh, but you'll say you swore it said $5 when you picked it off the shelf. The worker will say they have to charge what's there now and what it scanned as. Your choice to purchase it or go look for something else.
They've already started all this crap with online purchasing. It's just moving it to retail.
Surge pricing really only works when you put the customer in isolation. Uber can do it because you're the only one seeing the rate for the trip you want to take. Amazon can do it because you're shopping while taking a shit at work. Nobody else sees the prices in your online shopping cart, that's not the case in retail.
The profit motive behind these tags is wage savings. It saves in the time it takes to change out price tags when the prices do change. It saves in the time used in finding and replacing missing or damaged tags. It saves in the amount of manual price corrections at the till when the tag doesn't match the till because the tag wasn't updated - or the lost time and revenue if someone abandons their cart because of said disagreement.
Could they do what you're saying? Technologically speaking, it's been possible for several years - we've had these tags on most major store shelves in Canada for a very long time now and apps tracking our every move. Why hasn't it happened already? These stores have had everything they need to implement this scheme, and of all the shady cunts in this world, Galen Weston would have by now if it could have turned a profit.
It's easier to just price-fix the bread and pay a fraction of your profit in lawsuit settlements decades later than to do what you're describing.
OP was making a lot of shit up.
I can imagine price stickers would update daily, and individual users would get personalized discounts on their app.
App-less buyers would pay the baseline price in the sticker, app users would pay less. Like existing loyalty card programs, but with more data collection
If my local store switches to digital price tags to do this I'm just going to gather as many as I can and flush them down the toilet.
It's a nice thought but good luck not getting caught on the 3k cameras in the store and following you to your car.
In Poland it's already there in stores owned by the German Schwarz-Gruppe - Lidl and Kaufland. One might want to start shopping local to get exposed to 100% free range organic greed instead of lab-optimized greed at big stores.
Time to vote with our wallets. I absolutely will refuse to shop at any store in my area that starts implementing this.
A problem area is pricing that changes 10 minutes after you put it in basket but before checkout. Though OP did go through some other abuse scenarios, though some were far fetched. This can't allow a store to personalize prices the way a web site can.
This is what I came to the comments to gripe about this whole thing. Yes, they can play some games and probably will, but consider: People will be watching. They do this and you bet people will track this crap and post about it. The blowback will be huge.
If they're stupid enough to try this, it will not last. lol. You can raise prices over the long term, but fuck around with short term prices people can see changing for no good reason? Yeah.....
And on the "personal pricing" - that's written by someone that doesn't understand how barcodes work.
But I'm sure they will try to play some games with it.
remember if you see someone shoplifting food no the fuck you didnt
These have got to be hackable in a fun way
Firmware on these is pretty tight. They're usually using CC2510s or CC2530s. The CC2510 has a voltage glitch hack that you can use to attempt to read the contents via the DCOUPL capcitor, but it's not very effective and you can only read a few bytes per attack.
You can see a github some tools some have created here. Eventually someone is going to read the firmware off theses and be able to hack them, it's just a matter of time.
Boycott the stores that use them, it might help them change their mind behind they become the norm.
This is Australia and I think 90% of grocery shops are either this one or the competitor
If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we'll just have to start dynamic shopping.
Thanks. I hate it.
I'm going to start dynamic payments. "Oh, between 6-9pm I pay 10% less."
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"
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
I've gotta wonder... How expensive are these little networked e-ink displays? Probably not super expensive, but they've gotta be more than a paper price tag. Definitely more of a hassle to replace when someone breaks them by running into them, accidentally snapping them off, etc...
But more expensive than the wage of the person to go around replacing them for weekly sales? Walking back and forth to make a new tag to fill in an empty spot when something runs out?
Paper tags arent as easily damaged.
Should be against the law the 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.
In other news, shoplifting is inexplicably on the rise in shops featuring dynamic pricing.....
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