6 ms·

Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physic

• chucksta 6mo ago
  Facial recognition https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumers-and-raises-prices-with-or-without-facial-recognition/ https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
  • nsxwolf 6mo ago
    How is this supposed to work? There’s hundreds of people in the store. Someone is always right next to me. How will the can of peas know which price to display
    • themafia 6mo ago
      > There’s hundreds of people in the store. Where are you shopping? I get groceries the most I've seen is 30 people at a time. > How will the can of peas know which price to display People are talking about facial recognition and smart phones driving this. What they're missing is that your shopping cart is likely to contain a selection of items which make it _highly unique_. Not just on the day you're shopping but across large spans of time. Of course the lowest tech is I can just put a tracker in your cart or in your basket.
      • nsxwolf 6mo ago
        Midwest Walmarts, Meijer’s, Costco etc very often have hundreds of shoppers. So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed? And that’s not going to cause a bunch of commotion and demands for price checks at the checkout?
        • themafia 6mo ago
          > So we’re going to see a price and by the time we get to the register all the prices will have changed? I think the design of the system entails that the price you see and the price you pay would be the same. It's just that different customers are going to see different prices. Then the question is how do they track you from the time you picked the item to the time you scan it. Which is what I was opining on. > demands for price checks What would that look like in modern commerce? There is no "big book" of prices. The best you can do is go back to the shelf and say the price is wrong. Now you're debating which is the actual store price? The one on the shelf or the one on the computer? Stores are not generally obliged to honor mistaken prices although they may be in some states. Famously Arizona Iced tea is not actually 99c everywhere it's sold. It's then a game of chicken and most consumers will probably lose.
        • chongli 6mo ago
          If they profile all of the people in the store simultaneously, they can raise/lower prices based on time of day and item purchased. Then you won't see the prices changing constantly as people walk around the stores, they'll just change gradually throughout the day, when people aren't looking. If all the people who work at Goldman Sachs next door to the store get off work at 6pm, the store can raise steak prices at 6pm while lowering the price of Oreos (or whatever). It doesn't even have to be based on economic class statistics, it can be tailored to the specific times when individual people shop at the store and which items they buy.
• snide 6mo ago
  Stores are now putting QR codes for pricing, not listing the prices out on stickers/paper. You check on your phone, and often times walk through "scan and go" making direct payment on your phone. This is often done in stores where they say that prices can change daily, and that these tools help them keep prices up to date. The darker pattern is what this law prevents, and that even with this sort of labeling, they can't charge you different from what they charge me in the same store.
  • iamnothere 6mo ago
    I think this would be illegal in many places. A number of states require prices to be visibly posted, and some also require unit price to be shown.
  • alt_4577 6mo ago
    Interested know which stores are doing this QR code for pricing thing (and what area of the country).
  • crazygringo 6mo ago
    I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores. It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores. But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled out), but it seems like the consumer backlash is extremely strong so these experiments have stopped. Consumers want to be able to browse prices, that's pretty fundamental.
    • lastofthemojito 6mo ago
      Here's an example (not mine): https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/local_gas_station_removed_price_tags_and_replaced/ https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1s0n9al/... I also saw this in a gas station convenience store near me but I did not take a photo. I haven't seen it in a real grocery store yet.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• dTal 6mo ago
  E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.
  • crazygringo 6mo ago
    I still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores. But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
    • dTal 6mo ago
      Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
      • akramachamarei 6mo ago
        This arms race accelerates quickly. The question becomes stopping someone observing from a distance. It would have to be very tight to go unnoticed, and it seems likely to me that when detected it would quickly become a costly PR SNAFU, in addition to the cost of all the tech you need to deploy. I'd guess that grocers have little disposable capital anyway, given how low profits tend to be.
    • t-3 6mo ago
      In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.
• toast0 6mo ago
  > Like, there was a big kerfuffle a while ago about how Wendy's was going to engage in dynamic pricing so that a burger would be cheaper during the slow period at e.g. 3-4 pm, compared to the lunch rush. But that wasn't personalized. And the outcry was so strong they never did it, no law needed. That's crazy that people were kerfuffled over it as stated. Restaurants very commomly have early bird and happy hour specials which sounds like the same thing. Please come when we're not usually busy, thanks.
  • conductr 6mo ago
    Not fast food though. We have different expectations at different types of establishments Fast food prices are pretty sticky. We consumers don’t like anything changing or being dynamic. But it is was a communications failure. If they slowly raised the prices then announced time based discounts, like how a happy hour works then it probably would have been fine. Sonic does this. But dynamic and surge pricing means I never know what it’s going to cost until I’m ordering. That’s obviously a stupid strategy for budget dining.
  • snohobro 6mo ago
    It wasn’t really interpreted as “cheaper than normal from this time to this time” but as “we’re increasing meal prices during rush hours, at our sole discretion, whenever we feel like it. Too bad if you paid $4.99 yesterday at the same time, today it’s $7.99 because more people are physically here.” Even if that wasn’t quite how it was going to work, that’s all anyone heard.
  • lmkg 6mo ago
    The difference is that early-bird pricing is transparent and predictable. There is a written, known policy of $X discount during specific hours. You can plan for it. It's never a surprise. Dynamic pricing means sometimes you go there, and Wendy's decides on the fly whether you get a lower price and how much. It gives Wendy's the option to pinch pennies how they see fit for their own benefit, rather than offering a deal which you can choose to accept.
    • crazygringo 6mo ago
• Tangurena2 6mo ago
  > Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout. Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this. > Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout. > The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.” https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-deceptive-pricing https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti... The bill involved is HB 895. Maryland's online statutes have not been updated (yet) to include the new sections. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895E.pdf https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895E.pdf The convention (among US state legislatures) is that existing language of statutes is in plain text, strikethrough is text to be removed and underlined is text to be added.
  • manwe150 6mo ago
    Seems not contradictory to say that it legally has to match what you pay, when that is the content of the lawsuit against them, implying that their actions are illegal. Many states also already impose a stiff additional penalty for this practice (e.g. item must be sold heavily discounted or given free to any consumer that observes that the price charged at checkout differs from a price posted in the store)
  • Aurornis 6mo ago
    > Not all stores honor the prices posted on the shelves. Dollar General is one of the major offenders of this. That's already illegal, as indicated by your link about the ongoing lawsuits.
    • ryandrake 6mo ago
      Doesn't that depend on the state? I'm almost sure there are quite a few states that allow stores to charge a higher price at checkout than what the product is labeled with on the shelf.
• Starman_Jones 6mo ago
  The use case that jumps out at me is long tail items and whales. Let’s say that you’re a wine store, and you have an assortment of nice Italian wines all priced at $40 (to make it tidy). You’ve priced them competitively to attract your Chianti drinkers to step up and splurge if it’s a special occasion. A customer walks in, and the system recognizes that’s it’s Giovanni Vinoamore. Giovanni only comes in twice a year, but when he does, he leaves with two dozen bottles of Brunello and Barolo. It automatically raises the price of all those $40 bottles to $50. In the moment, you don’t care if a Chianti drinker puts a bottle of Barolo back, because you’ll make way more than that off of Giovanni. Once Giovanni leaves, the prices return to $40.
  • handoflixue 6mo ago
    But how do you do that without people noticing? If I pick up a $40 bottle of wine, and it's suddenly $50 when I hit the register, that's fraudulent pricing - you advertised one price when I picked up the project, but a different one because Giovanni is now in the shop.
    • Starman_Jones 6mo ago
      This problem already exists in retail. Pricing algorithms are easy to run, and paper tags are difficult to change frequently or in bulk. Every store will honor the posted price, but within that there’s still a range of responses between “make the customer happy” and “the onus is on the customer to prove that the register price is incorrect.” Digital signage really tips the scales against the customers proving that the price is wrong, but I expect that most companies will adopt policies closer to the “make the customer happy” end of the spectrum. It’s not worth fighting about $10, especially if you both know they’re right.
• caconym_ 6mo ago
  > So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores. Can't you just (in principle) use facial recognition cameras to determine who is approaching an item, calculate a "personalized" price and display it before they pick up the item, then make sure you match it at checkout? You could even use computer vision to only update price labels when people aren't looking at them, predict walking trajectories to pre-load prices and pre-resolve conflicts, and in ambiguous/low-confidence situations you could fall back on a default price. This all sounds a bit like science fiction, but there is some prior art with Amazon's retail experiments, and it seems like this sort of thing is getting easier and cheaper all the time. edit: some people have noted that you can have prices only visible viable via scanning qr codes, which makes this all much simpler. But I think you could do it with visible price labels too---you would lose some opportunities to jack up prices e.g. when multiple people are in close proximity to an item, but you could still profit in the (likely a majority of) situations where that's not the case.
• lokar 6mo ago
  For individual discrimination (vs neighborhood or time of day), one way would be what Macdonalds does: - raise all the prices - have an app (with an account) to give personalized discounts - use “AI” (or, just a regular program) to pick the optimal set of discounts per person, squeezing as much as you can out of them
  • xp84 6mo ago
    As a person who can't help being cheap, I do use all the fast food apps, and hate the dog-slowness of each one of them. It has been really interesting though, to see immediately when someone at McD or Wendy's HQ turns the discounting knob. McDonalds turned theirs down (for me?? who knows?) years ago, and Wendy's (sometime last year?) abruptly curtailed what used to be a really worthwhile regime (often giving any of a small burger, a drink, or fries for free with purchase) to one that usually just gives $1 off an item.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• sandworm101 6mo ago
  They remove the pricetags and replace them with a shopping ap able to track your habits and maximize your spending. This already happens online. Try getting two people to book a vacation, one on a new iphone and one using an ancient android. Prices will differ.
  • crazygringo 6mo ago
    That's basically an urban legend about vacation prices being different between iPhones and Android. It's not a thing. A bunch of people claimed it happened to them and it sounded sinister and plausible so it's spread a lot on social media. But there is no actual evidence of it and lots of people, including journalists, have tried to reproduce it and failed. And the thing is, it's really easy to pull up a flight today on an old android and see a cheap fare, and then pull it up on your Mac a day later and see it's much more expensive, and not realize that the reason for the price difference is because the cheap seats sold out and only the expensive ones are left.
• wat10000 6mo ago
  A lot of grocery stores allow ordering online for pickup or delivery.
• anjel 6mo ago
  Is the weather forecast calling for significant snow accumulations? Increase bread prices. That's how
• TheGRS 6mo ago
  Its probably easier these days for a customer to fight the checkout price than it would be for the store to implement surge pricing or whatever they want to do. Just take a timestamped photo of the price when you pluck the product off the shelf and compare it at the register. We could probably make an app that does all the calculating for you to verify and the only thing one would need to do is take a bunch of pictures as they shop, which is fairly trivial.
  • brewdad 6mo ago
    That sounds like a "fantastic" shopping experience. No thanks.
• m463 6mo ago
  personally, I think grocery stores do it in reverse. They raise prices across the board, and lower them if you give them your data for a loyalty program. Even though the price goes down, they adjust prices for you based on your personal data. You pay more if you don't give it up.
• ChuckMcM 6mo ago
  Its a much bigger problem on things like Amazon. My expectation is that Amazon would come under the provisions of this law if the buyer was in Maryland. One the most annoying things about Amazon is looking at different prices using a browser with no history and a VPN putting you in a different zip code, than the same product on your browser where they can see where you are coming from and know who you are.
• zeta0134 6mo ago
  The answer is loyalty programs. I wouldn't be surprised if many existing loyalty programs already violate this law in spirit. The customer is encouraged to scan their app, and offered personalized coupons. Anyone not participating pays the base (highest) price possible, and those who are price conscious get a tailored discount, which is not necessarily the same discount as their neighbor. (As an added bonus, the data stream from the loyalty program is attractive to marketing teams. Want to not be tracked? Higher prices for you!)
• _DeadFred_ 6mo ago
  'price listed is valid for the next 5 minutes' is how imagine enshittificaiton looking here.
• sfifs 6mo ago
  If a grocery store raises shelf prices across the board to be able to give discounts to a few, it will likely to lose customer footfalls to stores that don't. Grocery globally is generally (except food deserts in high crime areas) is a hyper competitive business with very low margins. So preventing personalized price increases should be the policy priority.
  • brewdad 6mo ago
    There has been a lot of consolidation in the industry over the past decade. There are three major grocery "brands" in my city. All of them have the same parent company. Quitting one store to go to another is about as effective as the people who boycotted Bud Light by switching to Modelo.
• djeastm 6mo ago
  >"surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") For your consideration: >"dynamic pricing" (which is just a friendlier-sounding synonym for "surveillance pricing")
  • frm88 6mo ago
    Dynamic pricing and surveillance pricing are two different things, e.g. reduce price for fresh produce by x% 1 hour becore the store closes = dynamic pricing. Surveillance pricing is based on personal data of the individual customer (browser history etc.) which, when applied to groceries is basically everything Instacart does.
• maxerickson 6mo ago
  Summary on the governor's site says it applies to 3rd party delivery services. https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/Governor-Moore-Signs-Legislation-to-Protect-Marylanders%E2%80%99-Pocketbooks-in-Grocery-Stores,-Safeguard-Voting-Rights,-and-Streng.aspx https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/Governor-Moor...
• magicalhippo 6mo ago
  Based on the headline I thought it was what grocery chains here in Norway do, where they have people hired to "shop" at a competitor while simultaneously noting prices on items. If they see the competitor has lowered the price of milk, they'll lower it to match. Apparently they can do such adjustments multiple times a day back and forth. Been some talk about banning that here.
  • vmilner 6mo ago
    "Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.
• xethos 6mo ago
  Everyone seems to be discussing physical, in-person shopping. Multiple stores near me do "Click'n'collect", where one picks out items online and just drives to the store to collect them (for example) on the way home from work Surveillance pricing something like that, pretty much entirely online? I think we can all imagine how to set that up without too much trouble