So, what if I go to the store with limited cash, choose the items I can buy with it, and then while I’m on my way to the register, the prices increase?
We have a lot of those in the EU as well, except prices change once every 48 hours at most, due to discounts activating or expiring. Shit like this is thankfully completely illegal, as is expected in any resonably advanced country.
Is like to point out that the USA is not a reasonably advanced country. It’s more like a third world country with a Gucci belt.
I get how this can save money in labour but there should be laws or regulations that prices cannot change during store open business hours. If not, greed wins yet again.
How would it work if the price changed between getting the item off the shelf and paying for it? Will I have to take a picture of every price tag in case the price goes up?
(In Germany) The legal purchase agreement is made at the register, which means you agree to those prices. The prices on the shelves are technically irrelevant, although if they are intentionally falsified you could sue for deceit or false advertising.
Which is why almost all stores will honour the prices on the shelves, even if they’re wrong, and also it’s just cheaper to adjust the price than to argue with customers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Ideally they should keep prices locked for 24 hours between changes
afaik there was somewhere that was suggesting having these labels adjust with who was in front of the item: track you through the store, link that to their internal profile of you, charge more if they think you can afford it/figure your susceptible to certain sales/etc
Wow that’s crazy. I can’t believe they’re doing this without telling the market or regional teams. They haven’t even told store managers about the individual pricing!
Because it’s not a thing. The digital price signage is so they don’t have to change individual labels on the thousands of items in the store, saving a huge amount of tedious labor.
Source: married to a store manager.
Just had her proof read this for accuracy and she pointed out that the digital prices can be changed from the office and price changes drop on Monday but still require someone to push them to the shelves. It is possible someone observed a price update while they were looking at the shelf, or this is just wild speculation.
Why?
Currently they release new prices on Monday, on a weekly basis, and they’re changed by hand throughout the day. The non-digital signage with last week’s prices can still be up while you’re shopping but at the register items will ring in with the new price.
If that happens they will honor the price on the shelf as long as the UPCs match (people move those price signs all the time, on accident and on purpose).
I understand the corporate bad evil company stance but in this instance people are reaching conclusions based entirely on wild speculation.
Should be a law that they can only set the price at the start of the business day with an exception for perishable goods marked down before they go bad, where the fresher ones are still regular price.
Edit: replied to the wrong comment, moved to where this one belonged.
You can only lower the price while the store is open for business. Any price hikes must be done between business hours. 24 hour stores can raise prices once per day during off-peak hours or something.
Hahahahaha
Great joke!
Was in one today and they haven’t made it here yet
Theoretically these have a lot of benefits as well, like saving on paper and ink. One barker could last as long as thousands of prices over its lifetime, and mean staff don’t have to spend time changing them.
I mean, capitalism gonna capitalise and they’ll be used for evil, mostly, but.
I wonder if they’re all wired or run off batteries? If the former, then there’s a single point of failure, if the latter then ho boy do I have a plan for a zigbee/wifi/whatever device.
I wonder if they’re all wired or run off batteries?
Batteries. Asked my local store manager (aka my wife). She also added that if you have the Walmart app open and can’t find an item on the shelf it will light the label up green so you can locate it.
I wonder if they’re all wired or run off batteries?
Batteries, I asked my local store manager (aka my wife). She also added that if you have the Walmart app open and can’t find an item on the shelf it will light the label up green so you can locate it.
I wonder if they’re all wired or run off batteries?
They may not be the same, but the ones we have in the EU, or at least the ones I’ve seen, run on batteries. They’re not connected to anything. You can just yoink one and it works. I’ve seen some people do that and was tempted to myself. Not sure about the software side. If it’s realistically possible to display something else entirely on them, then it’d be cool to have.
They run off batteries. Usually an entire rail has one battery for all the tags. But they only need to use power to change the screen. I forget the type of screen but its like digital ink? They usually refresh and maybe change price around midnight where i work. They do run off of something wireless but hell if i know exactly how it works.
that seems… unlikely, just because of the labour cost to change the batteries compared to a DC power supply and plugging the shelves in
They have to change whats on shelves and distances between items all the time. So changing batteries isnt all that uncommon.They also are pretty power effecient since the displays are e-ink Edit: also we have a box of batteries in the back. If we notice a whole rail isnt displaying properly we can go grab a new one and have it switched out in like 2 minutes.
Tear up the floors and put in micro generators that harness our footsteps that feed into the shelving and power the price tags wirelessly
Too expensive but that is a great idea for public spaces in general. Thermoelectric on open spaces would be cool, too. But while we’re dreamimg: por que no los dos.
Its funny everyone shits the bed that prices might go up when low margin grocers raise prices, but the Fed is out there pumping out 8% more money supply a year, and they further increase that printing if that money simply bids up stocks or home values.
Then they think its grocery stores raising prices 30c that’s making billionaires trillionaires, not the annual 8% money supply growth actively debasing peoples wages. When you’re measuring things in a rapidly expanding commodity what did people expect would happen?
This should absolutely be illegal. Not to mention how the prices don’t include taxes, you don’t know the real price you pay until you’re already at the checkout which is horseshit. It’s no wonder that online shopping has become much more popular.
Ironically, these “digital labels”, although problematic in their own right, could help with that.
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Currently if the store employees have missed a price change on a product, it might actually cost more than the sign says
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It would be pretty to easy to make those include tax IF these digital labels know which store they’re in.
They’d never do 2 because they like having the fake lower price listed so people are more likely to buy it.
… Yeah, you’re probably right.
I’m just used to living in a country where VAT is included in prices in stores anyway
I remember the culture shock of owing more than was listed on the price when coming back to the States.
I’ve only ever been in one state (NY; most time was spent upstate rather than in NYC), luckily the rate wasn’t too high (something under 10% combined state + local depending on county/city I believe? Compared to 24% VAT here). Kinda tripped me up, BUT I made it make more sense by looking at the price in dollars as if it was in euros as I was mostly paying by card whenever possible anyway, so the amount that went off my bank account was fairly close to what was on the price tags.
If I were to ever visit again, it’d be even better since the USD is now weaker, but tbf with this admin and the social media history requirement, I don’t think I’d even get into the country anyway so even being white enough to hopefully not be harassed by ICE isn’t enough nowadays lmao.
Oh, I can’t imagine voluntarily coming here now. Maaaaybe in the future if we somehow get our shit together, but that’s a big if! The dollar will probably be super weak after all the punching ourselves in the face we’ll have been doing by then, too.
To be fair if I’m coming over then it’d be for one of two things. Either one of my freelance customers has a big project they want me to work on full time and in-person, in which case they’d likely want me in a pretty damn hot and red part of the country, for which they’d have to pay me at least double my already decently high hourly rate (I’d be ok with this if I got triple digits hourly) - and I don’t think they have any such projects coming up… Or more likely, one day I want to visit the country with my kid, go on a roadtrip, see some of the national parks, etc. They’re currently way too young to appreciate that so I think it’d make more sense in like 7 or 8 years. By then I’m hoping the fascism has died down.
There would otherwise be more reason for me to visit - I have experience with some niche software built purely for the US market and do think I could architect a competitor in a market that only has choices ranking from bad to worse… But at this rate, I don’t trust the US to be a stable enough business environment for me as a foreigner in particular.
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I worked in a Walmart on the overnight shift (cleaning, separate company) when they rolled them out 3+ years ago here in Canada. They’ve honestly become the norm in grocery stores and other large stores here. If some company was going to be sleazy about them, it probably would’ve happened already (Loblaws, I’m looking at you).
I straight up asked why they were being installed, and it’s two-fold. One, they can save money cause now they don’t have to pay staff to go around and change the little paper tags, which takes an absurd amount of manpower and is easy to fuck up. And two, they can all be changed over to a barcode/QR code during inventory, which speeds up the whole process. I’ll be the last person to defend corpos, especially Walmart, but I don’t think this one was done with the intentions of directly fucking over the customer.
I feel like it’s one of those things that someone came up with the benign idea first, and then later some jackass was like “Hey, we could use these to change the prices every time a customer looks at it.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
I’ve worked retail and one of the things that baffled me was just how wasteful price tags were.
They change SO OFTEN and it’s so much paper and plastic just tossed it the trash every time. Never even thought about it until I worked at a store and had to change them.
God, right?! I could fill a bag full of the things nearly every day when I was cleaning before they switched over! I literally had a little bin I’d save them up in to take home to use as kindling for the fire pit cause they’d already been replaced. Though, I think the lack of waste is more a pleasant side effect than a reason why these companies did it. Either way, it’s still a positive!
Best buy and other stores have genuinely already been using these for ages.
I once worked retail and it was a pain to run around printing labels for hours. Granted, I got paid by the hour, so there were much worse things to do.
I also don’t believe this is a nefarious plot, but it does enable dynamic pricing. Stores are creepy these days, they have sensors and network hardware that can track you in the store. They also can do facial recognition.
So they know who you are, where you are / where you went, what you ultimately buy (just enter your rewards number!). So they could literally see someone coming and raise prices on certain items as they enter the store.
Not to say that is a strategy companies are actively employing, but all the pieces are there.
Reference to help you sleep at night: https://documentation.meraki.com/Wireless/Operate_and_Maintain/User_Guides/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Location_Analytics
I definitely get what you’re saying, and in any other context, I’d definitely agree. I just can’t quite see it working without some sort of identifying thing, like a loyalty card or some intense customer tracking (and we all know how that went with the Amazon Go stores). Mainly because there’s not a good way to identify a specific item taken from a shelf full of the item, given UPCs are the same for all units of a product so it’d have to be done by cards or tracking.
I could be wrong, but given the current state of tech, I don’t really see it working in a large, busy store like a Walmart or Canadian Tire. At least, not to reliably target individuals. I could see it being used to change prices for everyone, based on time, date, temperatures, and stuff like that, but yeah…
Also, apologies if this doesn’t make full sense. I’m radically under caffeinated right now 😅
I guess they could do it with rfid tags on every imdividual item but at $0.05-$50 per tag that doesn’t seem remotely worthwhile.
Smartphones with WiFi can now be used as an indicator of customer presence thanks to a WiFi mechanism that is common across all such devices: probe requests. These 802.11 management frames are transmitted at regular intervals from WiFi devices. The frames contain information that can be used to identify presence, time spent, and repeat visits within range of a WiFi access point. These devices can be detected by WiFi access points irrespective of its WiFi association state meaning that even if a user does not connect his or her device to the wireless network, the device’s presence can still be detected while the device is within range of the network and the device’s WiFi antenna is turned on.
I’m just a developer, so admittedly I’m unsure if the frames they refer to have any uniquely identifying information. Hopefully not. At the very least they get a heat map of where phones are in the store.
If you connect to the wifi they will get your MAC address for sure, but that’s usually randomized every time you connect.
Hypothetically if you hop on their wifi they can track your device for the duration of that connection all the way to the register. Then you use your credit card or rewards programs and they can put it together. (When I swipe my card at microcenter they always say “do you still live on…” since I’ve purchased online from them.)
Locally at one of our sports stadiums you swipe your card walk in to a snack area, grab what you want, and walk out with it. They use cameras and other sensor to make that possible. If they can figure it out Walmart certainly can.
This is all tinfoil hat stuff based on pieces of information I have, but it sure is interesting to think about.
Yeah, there’s definitely ways of tracking people even today. I just don’t really see it working at scale without the customer actively doing something to “opt in” to that kind of tracking system, like loyalty cards, connecting to the wifi, etc. Mind you, I’m just some nerd, so I could be wrong/missing something, but yeah lol
They actually have some neat features, if implemented. There’s one where you can scan a QR code to go right to the product page where you can get, among other things, more verbose allergen info, reviews, or, if the product is out of stock where you scanned it, it can give you similar alternate products or stores that have stock.
It can also allow you to go on to the website, find your item, and ask the pricetag to flash.then you can look for the flashing pricetag if you can’t find the item on the shelf.
I haven’t seen the QR codes linking to the product page yet, but I’ve seen the flashing tags to find stuff, and it’s cool af! Like, yes we may be quickly sliding into a dystopian hellscape, but we can have some cool little things along the way… As, y’know… A treat lol
I wish I could boycott them, but haven’t gone there in years
But seriously, they’re not talking about price segmentation, just a more efficient way to update their prices
“…not talking about price segmentation…”
Yet.
There are rules about having to honor advertised prices. The savvy and poor will notice.
- Hack e-ink price tag
- Take photo “proving” low price
- Get minimum wage checkout supervisor to honor displayed price
- Profit
Careful, thats how you’ll end up in neo-gitmo
legitimately, it is fraud. like, no question, naked, bald fraud.
Your username makes me wish I could change this account name to MaamThisIsAWendys
There are rules about having to honor advertised prices.
Yes there are. And normally you’d go look at the price tag to prove the different advertised price vs register price. What do you do now that they can change that price instantly?
You tell them to take the item out of your order, and they can deal with restocking the item in their shelf.
They have these at the local Canadian tire, they take 2-3 minutes to change the displayed price, flickering a dozen times as they do. Real slow epaper screens
This ^ All the grocery stores in my area have them and it has yet to be an issue.
Also, not sure if you know this, but apparently if you have the Crappy Tire app, you can get the tags to flash/blink if you’re looking for a product. Not sure how exactly it works on the customer’s end, but my mum was telling me about it lol
Here’s the thing: You live in Canada, where consumer protection laws mean something and the law isn’t largely based on which side of a case can burn money the longest on court fees and outlast the other side.
Here in the US, companies doubling the price of something just so they can mark it as on sale for 50% is illegal, but still happens all the time for big sales like Black Friday. Hell, Amazon does it to people with a Prime membership in order to recoup what they spend on the free shipping - double dipping with your subscription fee and increasing the price on things. Airline companies and hotels will increase the price of a flight or room on a specific day based on how often you search it up (if you allow cookies, that’s how they track it. You can look up the same page in a private window and get a totally different price for the same flight or hotel room).
Sony just announced a few weeks back that they were going to roll out “dynamic pricing” for PlayStation games.
No, Canadian companies pull the same bullshit too. Consumer protection laws are little more than “agreements” that many companies are directly pulling out of. In particular with grocery stores, if Galen Weston (the owner of the largest family of grocery chains in the country) wants it, it happens. Look into the bread price fixing situation from a few years back. Nothing actually came of it on a legal front, aside from metaphorically smacking the companies on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and being told they’re being bad.
Didn’t know that, I’ll have to check it out
Rules for who
That’s how they get ya
There’s no sense closing the barn door after all the horses got out.
Are the cameras going to detect when I have a fever and then triple the cost of Tylenol?
Actually, they’ll start with surprise specials and flash deals, like KMart used to do with their blue light specials. They will use it to discount over-stock as it gets near the sell-by date.
And then, once they’ve got you used to the prices changing at random times, maybe even getting people to come back in shop in the store more often but offering really great deals (like black Friday started out) . Then they will begin to have “peak pricing”, where you pay more on busy days and times.no, they detect autism
Shit, I’m fucked.
Clickbait title
And they’re already dogshit in practice. Some of them are broken, we can’t tell where to put things because the stupid digital interface glitches. People misplace them. They aren’t properly installed or they’re a pain to install. They don’t even blink when you try to find something.
Oh yeah, what a wonderful investment…
Yeah they break way too easily. I swear half the ones on the bottom shelf are wrecked from carts hitting them where i work.
Sure. But still better than what the likely endgame of digital price adjustments might be. It can never be good for the customer when the store has an easier time dynamically adjusting prices.
And let me guess - they still don’t display the price including tax?
You will never get anyone to display a higher price voluntarily, it’ll take legislation.
Be sure to handle them appropriately, the screens are vulnerable to damage, and replacing them would be more expensive than printing out a new paper tag. It’d sure be a shame if the corps lost money there.
Shame if my trusty thumb tac accidentally pressed into the screen and ruined it
Technically, a price can change at 9 a.m., change again at 2 p.m., and change again before the dinner rush.
Technically in one sense, maybe. Technically in a practical sense, no. Because the price on the shelf is the agreed price to pay, and if it changes after you put it into your cart, that’s gonna break laws.
People are making hay over something that will not happen.
but let’s say it does. People will absolutely lose their SHIT. And while companies are stupid, they are not THAT stupid. And even let’s say they ARE that stupid: This is the type of the legislatures would love to pass laws about becauase it’s easy to do and extremely popular. Like cops running stings. It’s easy and shows they’re doing something.
So I am absolutely zero worried about this and all this hype is stupid.
Will they changes prices nightly? Sure. Will they change prices multiple times during the day or for individual shoppers? Nope.
And if they were going to pull this shit, they’d already be pulling it online where they can already do that. And yet, not a single fuckin peep about that from any of these people hyping up this thing.
If the price of an item was changed after I pull it off the shelf, I’m telling the cashier to take the item out of my order; and the company can deal with the logistics of restocking the item. For future shopping trips I’m using my smartphone to snap a picture of every price tag as I’m putting an item in my cart. Failure to honor the price on the tag when I pulled it off the shelf is met with me walking the fuck out of the store with nothing. Now you can cancel the entire order and restock a whole cart of groceries. Let’s see how many man hours of labor you save then.
You’re at Walmart doing grocery shopping, and you fill your cart with all kinds of foods. Are you going to realize the tomatoes are ringing up at $2.51/lbs when the label was $2.40 in?
I don’t think it would be illegal, the price tag is not a contract and it’s often mislabeled today. The question is, can you get people to accept that the price will go up or down before you checkout, and will they just pay when it goes up or create a new stock return inventory?
If the chicken you’ve been walking around the store with went up and you decided you didn’t want it anymore, that’s straight to the trash. What products will they target with this?
I think it’s more likely to go down during the day to compete with other stores than to go up on you, but who knows what these greedy fucks are going to do.
Are you going to realize the tomatoes are ringing up at $2.51/lbs when the label was $2.40 in?
You’re telling me in this day of grocery prices impacting us that nobody would notice this happening? All it takes is for a very few people noticing it for people to riot.
I would be MORE surprised if there are NOT cases of people claiming this is happening when it’s not.
Also, if there are rumours that it is happening, there will be people who take pics of prices on the shelves and compare that to the checkout price. If they find it happening, they WILL post and people WILL be up in arms about it.
Another person replying mentioned gas. People drive miles out of the way to save a nickel per gallon - average tank is like 10-20 gallons, give or take, meaning they will spend a couple of dollars to “save” 50¢-$1.00 or so. People are not rational about these things, and if they try it, someone will catch it, and when they catch it, all hell will break loose.
i remember numbers, so yes?
last time i paid gas was a week ago, 5.359 at sams club if you doubt (i just pulled that out of my ass but it’s correct, i checked my phone).
That’s cool. I don’t think you’re an average consumer.
nah. i worked with numbers for 25 years. i’m well below average. can’t even do arithmetic anymore unless it’s all variables.
so they are kinda already pulling it online. amazon does it. but like, they let me know when the price of something in my basket changes immediately. big notification.
very different from putting it in your cart and finding out at the checkout. now if you need to make a substitution… godsdammit we gotta go wait in line again? if they do that, they gotta put something on the carts to ding you when something changes or i’ll lead the riots myself.
or i’ll lead the riots myself.
This is why they won’t. Or if they do, it will not be for long. People will be up in arms. That’s why I’m not worried about it happening.
You have too much faith in your idea of what can and can’t happen.
