Those have existed here for a long time and we got none of those problems.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that's usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.
I’m pretty sure this was in the book of revelations.
Obviously the way to combat this is to organize dozens or more people who just walk around, load up shopping carts, then leave the store without buying anything. They can pay people to put everything back.
Haven't digital price tags been used for decades? I'm sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago
Yeah these have existed for a while.
I think the only thing new is that walmart previously talked about actually implementing "on demand pricing" and now that they're adding digital price tags they could actually do it.
I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won't have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.
Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.
Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.
or estimated net worth
Walmart credit card. They don't need to estimate when you willingly provide it.
@Powderhorn These have been the norm in my country already for quite a while FWIW, haven't tested if they change these prices often or not however.
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