- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
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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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?
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.
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.
On the shelves, surge pricing.
Weekend evenings, pizza and beer prices skyrocket. Rest of the week evenings, staples are higher like beef, chicken, etc. Holidays, Turkey prices go up the closer to thanksgiving you get. Plastic cups, paper plates, grilling necessities go up approaching the 4th of July.
“Oh, but it’s just shortages…”
Price gouging by any other name if still illegal. A heatwave, especially in this escalating climate crisis, is no different than a hurricane or other natural disaster and many places already have laws to deal with the ethics of raising prices under those circumstances.
- Buy groceries when the price is low.
- Refund when the prices go up.
- Profit!
Receipts have a time stamp, so they’d have a record of the actual price you paid. If you paid in cash and didn’t get a receipt, and if they make an exception for your return, they’d base it on when you said you bought it. You might be able to get one or two exceptions depending on who’s working. With that said you’d better make a purchase of thousands of dollars and pay in cash to make sure to get at least a few dollars back for your efforts.
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.
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.
Don’t worry, they will also be making it so you have to use their data mining apps that require unconscionable permissions just to see that they are changing prices every 10 seconds.
“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.
And the said that it’s a good thing.
Capitalism is a disease.
So dumb. Could have said just ice cream and the message would carry better
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
If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.
If people are starving after a natural disaster, we can raise the price of everything because they’re desperate and have no alternatives.
Are we to judge simple supply and demand now? If they haven’t been smart enough to save for a disaster, then perhaps they deserve what they get. If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Bah. Humbug. A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every natural disaster.
/S
the hottest
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."
“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.
One half of that is good news for one party and bad news for the other and the other half is the opposite.
I think this person needs a psychological evaluation.
If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news
Except we know they would rather throw that shit out than sell it cheaper… maybe they will donate it.
I can’t speak for everywhere, but the Kroger here sells meat close to its expiration date for low prices. Of course, you often have to use it that night in order to be safe, but…
Or freeze it
Good point.
I was never a grocer, but I worked in the catering industry for almost 10 years (which, to be fair, is a very different industry that just happens to have some overlap). Standard procedure is to throw away practically everything that can’t be reused on another event. I talked to the higher-ups about this multiple times and they always gave me the same two answers: ‘We can’t be liable for someone getting sick from eating our old food’ and ‘We donate to Second Helpings once a year, so at least we try’
So you were told to get fucked?
Checks out lol
They would not let you take it home?
Officially, no. But when you’re the last truck to get back at 3am, nobody’s gonna stop me. Every once in a while they would look the other way, but it honestly depended on their mood more than anything else
i get the official position, IRS could deem it income with everything that comes with that
so arbitrary enforcement of policy, corpo world 101
I mean, I get it too, but I was also throwing away enough food to feed at least a dozen people (usually much more) every single day. To make it worse, I drove by at LEAST 2-4 unhoused persons on the way back to the shop (not even counting my drive back home)
My wedding had a food minimum.
We come from big Italian families, in multiple meanings of the word. There was still so much food. Hors d’oeuvres, cheese board, crudites, bread tray, 3 courses, dessert…and then 11 o clock hits and the last food comes out. Pizza. So much fucking pizza.
I’d never seen so much food waste in one place. I really hated that there was a food minimum. The venue itself was cheap, and nice, but I’m certainly not getting married there again.
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.
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.
They’ll price check it and find the new price. The customer will be blamed.
Sounds like a good idea to take photos of the price signs in that case.
Good. Annoy the managers until they get rid of this shit
The pricing decisions will be made above the manager’s pay-grade.
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.
Then you pour it out at the checkout and walk out without paying.
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”?
There are laws in many states
For now…
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.
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.”
Now imagine if that bitcoin went down 50% in the same time frame.
So that’s what people think crypto is like.
I don’t go to walmart anymore. I think I am just going to go back and see how much I can steal.
Remember, if a company steals from you and the entire country on a regular basis, it’s smart business. If you so much as steal food from them, you’re a monster.
Nah fuck that, first off fuck you for stealing and secondly, it is way worse for these shitheads to have stock sit around and go bad instead of marking it as a loss cuz stolen.
The article has a suit giddy with the thought of stealing from people by price gouging water in a heat wave, and you’re over here not advocating to steal back from them? Yikes.
you’re right! time to smash cameras
We already got enough food going to waste
We were discussing this devices at university back in 2005. Too expensive at the time.
