Late Stage Capitalism

It's actually so much worse than that.

With e-labels you can optimise your prices in real time, A/B testing the public across the country in minutes to optimise for the highest rate a population will tolerate indefinitely.

Then, you can offload the management of this service to a third party, which sounds daft at first, but this provides deniability when it comes to price fixing. When EvilCorp contracts with all grocers in a given province/state, they can slowly hike the price of bread by 1% every hour until they maximise profits, screwing you. They can even optimise for time of day/region/whatever, all with deniability.

Surge pricing is a distraction. The real profit is in squeezing the public slowly.

ive worked in a store that had that

it was so much time saved, compared to running around and replacing paper/stickers

And sure they COULD change the prices on random "whims" but they'd get a ton of angry customers. imagine grabbing an item for 5 bucks on the shelf, then when you get to the checkout, the price is 10?

our system only updated the prices at night

Basic necessities should be always free. Think there was a case of elderly woman collapsing at Disneyland because they confiscated water at the entrance so she just drank the cheapest drinks which were energy drinks.

These people are cut from the same cloth as the guy that developed gas pump ads with no volume control. Hell can barely keep up with all the special circles they've been having to build Lately.

Price raising in response to demand isn't always a bad thing, it cuts back on hoarding. Recall toilet paper shortages, for eg. Alternative is rationing, which cuts some folks out entirely and incentives a bunch of dumb behavior.

Boo to personalized pricing. But idk how eager I am to get out the tomatoes.

I mean it could be a precursor for that but where I live some stores have had them for over half a decade without surge pricing. But who knows

Why is everyone so angry?! Think of the shareholders you selfish fucks!

When I was a kid Walmart had a policy that if something rang up for more than was listed on the shelf price you would get $3.00 off the item. How times have changed.

My local Walmart doesn’t even seem to even want people shopping in the store anymore. They are constantly blocking off aisles with full pallets of products that haven’t been put away yet, the Walmart pickup workers are running through aisles and blowing through intersections with headphones on, and they never have any bags at the checkouts.

They can charge as much as they want for the stupid bottled water, but safe drinking water should come out of the taps and be free for everyone. That’s not the case in too much of the world, no thanks to megacorps.

If you add surge pricing then I’ll just ramp up giving myself discount by stealing from you.

reminds me of the old total recall movie, where they were charging for breathable air.

The example given isn't really a good one. When I was a kid I worked at a grocery store and I know how they did the pricing. Pricing was normally done once a week, to align with the weekly discount magazine (often in the store the current weeks discounts magazine and next week discounts magazine would be available for shoppers). Prices were switched out manually by the store manager and a couple of other people. These were small printed paper pricetags in a little plastic insert. As the people who did the price changes did thousands a week, they got really fast at it. With one flick they would remove the old tag and put in the new. So even back then the prices were changed out often. Prices were def influenced by the weather, as even back then general weather reports were accurate enough. We would usually know when really hot weather would come, or really cold weather.

But products like ice or water are a bad example anyways, as those would in fact be discounted when it's hot out. The idea is to pull in people from the street with those promotions and have them impuls buy other things. Or draw in shoppers that would normally shop at another store, but are drawn in by the tasty looking ice cream promotion. It's also a supply and demand kind of thing, where in the summer a lot more ice cream is being sold and thus bought in by the store. This pushes down the price, not raises it up.

I wonder if it is really worth the time of somebody at the store to micro-manage prices like that. Usually those kinds of stores have a well thought out strategy and stick to that. And in my experience cutting labour costs is more important, so they usually run with a pretty tight crew. This means nobody has time for micro-optimisations like that. Doing some other task that reduces the amount of people working there pays off much sooner. Maybe with automation in the future, but that would require very accurate stock management and I just don't see how that's possible in a grocery store context.

When Georgetown Texas flooded they tripled the price of 5 gallon water jugs.

Walmart "we're noticing a large increase in theft of the products we're trying to gouge people on, strange."

They can raise it with sticker pricing too.... Like just change the price and print a new sticker... Whenever they want...

... we've had those for ... 5 or 10 years?

But iirc surge pricing in stores isn't allowed ... I should check that actually ... :|

Walmart should be collectivized