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Fun read but >Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars No one [^1] price matches f
by krackers 8mo ago
Fun read but
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
>once AI agents equipped with MLS access
The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.
Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.
[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.
- jjmarr 8mo ago> > once AI agents equipped with MLS access > The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers. Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.
- botusaurus 8mo agocompanies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing
- dboreham 8mo agoIn the case of the MLS example, there's also a private market (at least in some places, including where I live). Basically nothing in the MLS on any given day is attractive at the asking price. Only newly listed properties are going to be of interest to a discerning buyer. Some proportion of new listings never make it to the MLS because the agent already knows a suitable buyer.
- jahsome 8mo ago> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop. This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.
- Tadpole9181 8mo agoI'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it. It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
- krackers 8mo ago>or just outright not buy it Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?
- jahsome 8mo ago> but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar Some people have no choice. Checking other stores and planning multiple trips is exactly what they do, e.g. those on fixed income, coupon power-users, etc. Outside our comfy bubble here, there are a LOT more folks in that camp than those buying luxury goods.
- threethirtytwo 8mo agoIt’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do. Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.
- vmg12 8mo agoIf I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.
- krackers 8mo agoAre you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip? > I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
- vmg12 8mo ago> mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings The AI could also research which stores are reputable. > People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body. Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.
- NobleLie 8mo agoGrok, show me the place where the least people died eating product X.
- Ancalagon 8mo agoYes from all those reputable AI reviews
- Terr_ 8mo ago"Reputable" + Stochastic LLMs + Profit motive = A vast sea of poisonously false data and prompt injection attacks
- jonwinstanley 8mo agoPresumably the agents will band together on Moltbook and buld their own TrustPilot competitor? :-)
- nightski 8mo agoI don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.
- __d 8mo agoYes, but. When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
- rrr_oh_man 8mo agoSounds like you’ve never been broke.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoIt sounds exactly like they've been broke
- jstummbillig 8mo ago> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere. Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.
- formerly_proven 8mo agoThe current AI-meta-shopping-research experience (using e.g. ChatGPT Deep Research) is largely garbage, especially for goods where the infosphere is dominated by the manufacturers and they're also using SKU-spraying, e.g. white goods. DR is of course fairly decent (if rather slow) at comparing hard-facts, but that's often easy for most goods anyway ("find me a motherboard with features X, Y, Z" goes _way_ quicker using a site like skinflint than chatgpt). Meanwhile it sucks at comparing stuff that are also annoying to compare manually. So the gain here is very low in my experience.
- jstummbillig 8mo agoHow much, as a % of your total wealth, would you be willing to bet on the believe, that this experience will not be radically transformed within the coming 2 years and then also allow for ~frictionless agentic price matching?
- rrr_oh_man 8mo agoHow much would you bet it will not be enshittified 2 years later?
- jstummbillig 8mo agoAnything from 0 to 100%? Depending on what you are actually proposing. "enshittified" is fairly vague.
- jmye 8mo agoI’m not clear what you think AI changes in healthcare, or which middlemen you mean? Is it the thousands of start-ups pretending you can use AI for better care? Or are you suggesting the middle men are the doctors?