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.
The closest thing I can think of would be Quebec, they have some fairly strong consumer protections, but i don’t know how far they would extend in cases like this
stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected
Not a lawyer but couldn’t they just refuse to sell it to you? We all know it would be bullshit but couldn’t a company say “Oh that minimum wage clerk made a mistake, but don’t blame them, just an honest mistake.”
Or is the law, if it’s on the shelf, it must be honored?
They would have to refuse to sell to anyone. It would likely not be lawful to leave it on the shelf and sell it at the higher price to someone else who might not have noticed the discrepancy, until they fix up the shelf pricing.
Once dynamic pricing is ultimately accepted as the norm, what is the lowest price? Also, if you have the ability to instantly correct pricing “mistakes”, then you never have to stop selling the product. There’s no penalty for gouging people until someone notices, and you can instantly revert to a known tolerable price and start over.
If dynamic pricing is legal, and accepted by the consumer, whether as frequent expected pricing fluctuations, or the worst case scenario of personalised pricing, these protections may well be unenforceable.
remember if you see someone shoplifting food no the fuck you didnt
Especially if you work there.
honestly the best part about working at a supermarket was delivery day when i could weave through the maze of pallets and sleep on the paper towels behind everything like a fort. i sure as fuck aren’t going to report anyone shoplifting food.
Thank you for your service in working minimum effort at a giant corpo
Dynamic pricingPrice gouging. FTFY.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.
It would be a shame if your phone was infected by a malware that rewrites all the prices in the tags in your vicinity.
Why is everything suddenly $800.85? :-P
These tags are e-ink, so there could be monochrome pictures!
Haha, ASCII schlongs begone! Now there are pictures.
Of course I wouldn’t be doing it without some preparation.
Security cameras in stores are kept purposely garbage so they don’t get bugged by the police to provide footage to them. Unless something changed in the last decade since I worked in a retail joint.
It has definitely changed a lot
I can tell you from personal experience that there exists a very happy corporate servant who is happy to give footage to police. The security cameras in some stores are shit because the owner is cheap (this is the case with most gas stations).
Why would they care?
My local Woolies has had e-ink tags for at least two years, maybe more. Between this and Coles hiring Palantir, we mostly shop at Aldi. Bunnings and Kmart using facial recognition as if it’s no biggie as well. How long until they partner with CBA to check your credit card limit as you stand in front of the bananas to see how much you’ll pay?
They’re opening an Aldi’s near me. I’m excited.
Aldi’s is the shit. No bloat, no bs, just groceries. They don’t have some stuff, but for the staples you’re set. I usually go to the more traditional grocery store every 4th trip or so.
Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.
Dynamic sounds way more fun!
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?
That’s the personalized prices. That’s step two.
This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.
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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
It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.
So, Sunday afternoon being the worst time to grocery shop will Leo be the most expensive time to shop.
Versus 9am on a Wednesday.
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
Au contraire
In other news, shoplifting is inexplicably on the rise in shops featuring dynamic pricing…
We can’t compete against these internet stores. People just don’t respect brick and mortar and buying locally anymore /s
Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.
The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”
You wouldn’t shoot a man over a bagel, would you?
Corporate America:
slavery is legal in jails (in the US)
It is morally correct to shoplift from stores that do this.
It might not be legal, but it’s already morally acceptable to shoplift from Coles and Woolworths
I just don’t because it would be a massive pain if I were to be caught
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
I knew it was Australia, didn’t realise that there was such a monopoly. Still possible, just makes it harder. Are there stores that aren’t part of any chain? They’re dying out here, usually the owners have signed up to a franchise.
It’s unlikely to happen anyway, but there should be a way that we can universally stop greed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Time to vote with our wallets. I absolutely will refuse to shop at any store in my area that starts implementing this.
Sure… If you even notice it. And if enough people will care and if there are still stores around that don’t do that, clearly superior profit maximising scheme.
I’d rather want this stuff to become illegal. So calling your representatives, make news and go to the streets about this would I think help more that yet another boycott.
I completely agree. Best case scenario I hope this becomes illegal, however if not then I still would never shop somewhere with this sort of scummy tactic.
if there are still stores around that don’t do that
That would be my concern is that we end up with an illusion of choice.
Or be like me where we have two Coles over the road from each other and a woolworths 5 minutes down the road and that’s about it beyond corner stores that are only there surviving off the sale of alcohol to itinerants who get refused service at big name bottlos
and then there will be a really popular AI driven phone app that you will use to scan items and find out if you’re being ripped off or not
I already have a browser plugin that tells me the price history of everything at Coles. There’s one for Woolies too.
Good choice of product to care about.
I actually saw Tim Tams on the shelf at a Morrison’s in Northern Scotland, and it was cheaper than Coles in Australia. It’s absurdly priced here.
I found an industrial sized box of them, and snapped them up. I’ve been doling them out to some poor ozzies stuck in my neck of the woods for months now. I think the end price was about two dollars a box.
$6 dollarydoos for fucking timtams?!
Even at $3.60, the supermarkets are pissing on you and telling you it’s raining.
Do you have an App that offers better places to shop?
What’s the name of that plugin?
Coles Trend.
You might need to upgrade your browser 😉
Sigh, no you don’t need a fucking AI app to do that.
And you ARE being ripped off if you are dealing with a corporation, whether it’s the price, the quality, the quantity, the fine text, ect. You are getting fucked every single time.
So please don’t be holding up the line and blocking aisles while your chatbot nanny tells tells you that everything in FUCK-YOU-LOL-MART™ is overpriced. Learn how underscan and shotplift like a normal person.
Sigh, no you don’t need a fucking AI app to do that.
AI could just be used as a buzzword, so that the movement becomes more popular
Not quite the same thing, but I used an LLM to cobble together a HTML file that allows me to search for products on Coles, Woolies, Aldi and Amazon at the same time in the same window (via frames and a Firefox extension to get around some security settings).
Works a treat when planning our big shops for the week, and has already saved us hundreds of dollars since Jan.
Thanks. I hate it.
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
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.
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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.
The solution of which is that you change the tag before you change the actual price if it’s an increase, and the price before the tag if it’s a discount, with a long enough delay. That’s what they do with gas pumps and the advertisements here in Finland.
“It was $2.99 when I picked it up.”
Watch a product for a minutes, clock the lowest it displays in that time, run in and grab it, “It was $2.99.”
Repeat for all 30 items in your cart just to annoy the store.
