Deeply divisive political topics driving a wedge between Americans - midterms must be coming up.
If in the next 6 months you find yourself inexpliciavly angry at other working class Americans and being convinced that the solution to your problem is to take a stand on a black and white issue you just learned about in the last 10 minutes - congratulations, Americas bipartisan politcal virus has infected you!
This actually seems like a pretty uniting issue. I haven't seen many politicians of any party openly come out in favor of the sort of price discrimination banned by this bill.
Came to say the same thing. Though calling it 'price discrimination' will bring out the MAGAs who will reflexively conclude that banning it must be woke/DEI and then demand to have it everywhere. Better to call it 'diverse pricing' to get the opposite reaction.
Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
In my country prices are often wrong because supermarkets are run by a small team of literal teenagers (one of the downsides of having decent minimum wages is that nobody wants to hire anyone if they somehow can avoid it).
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
What is a "membership discount" (assuming you don't mean coupons) in the context of a grocery store? Can you give an example of a major grocery store that has one?
For what it's worth,
> The bill clarifies that certain practices, such as promotional pricing, loyalty programs, or price differences based on objective costs like shipping, are not considered prohibited dynamic pricing.
Harris Teeter is an example of a large chain that has promotions (not coupons) that are applied at checkout only if you have your VIC card (their free membership program). There’s a lot of BOGO, a few dollars off etc offers that are tagged to the price label throughout the store.
I used to shop at HT at the last place I lived. It was always crazy seeing all of those discounts pop up. I don't know if I was actually saving money over the other stores nearby but it certainly felt like it. Honestly, I like shopping at Lidl now. My grocery bill always feels much cheaper. I don't get much savings using my phone number, I think they want you to clip coupons on the app but I still walk out paying less than I would elsewhere. A large portion of the stuff at Lidl are not major brands, I suspect they are the companies that produce white label products for store brands.
Got it, thank you for the example. That seems to be still allowed by the bill.
The behavior targeted here seems to be more like "Our data indicates this person is poor and desperate, let's charge them more for rice and beans than we charge other people, since that's most of what they'll buy. We've calculated that we can charge up to $X to exhaust their budget/foodstamps and they'll still buy."
In Europe every big chain of stores has loyalty programs and they are busy throwing coupons and discounts. And I don't think they are under any obligation to make sure that they offer the same coupons to everyone.
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).
That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.
> If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
How would you do it if pricing is dynamic and changes every day?
By the time competitor finds out about the price, you might have already reduced it, making it look like theirs is more expensive even after they applied discount.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
I think that opaque pricing is bad in that it creates a feeling of helplessness in the customer, is annoying and after every deal it makes you feel like you have been ripped off. Like the - call us to get a quote on some sites instead of direct pricing.
To a lesser extent it is the same with loyalty programs - my grocery stores often discount items to 50% and on my receipt it there is usually something like - you saved 20 Euro - which could be 20 to 30% of the bill. A lesser mind than the average consumer's may suspect that they keep all the prices permanently inflated by 20 to 30% and if some schmuck dare to buy their favorite cheese when not discounted - it is on them.
With both parties scrambling to buy non-taxpayer votes with taxpayer money, the list is endless. Free healthcare, free tuition, pork barrel spending, wars on behalf of other nations, lavish benefits for your ethnic group’s immigrants, etc.
You believe that poor people don't 'pay taxes', even though all of their money and excess labor value is definitionally recirculated into the economy or back to the government?
You believe in the world's most expensive healthcare, the world's most expensive universities(/hedge funds), corrupt spending on corporations, wars on behalf of the empire, and our vassal states, and 'lavish' benefits for only corporations and white people (as has been the case since we invented whiteness)?
Am I correctly understanding that this status quo is your preference?
I'm also curious which benefit is specifically 'lavish'. The only social programs I'd describe as such are the programs that create billionaires.
Or do you just think that politicians shouldn't talk about rent, fuel, and food prices?
Or is your contention that the working poor just stupid for believing anything will ever get better in our two party system?
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.
They should leave dynamic pricing. The rich could then hire poor people to do their shopping. Everybody wins. This is semi sarcastic. In chasing absolute maximum returns they open themselves for eventual gaming of the system.
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
How would that work? The barcode on the item doesn't get rewritten, the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item. Even if they did assign unique barcodes to each item, what happens if you take the item off the shelf, and put it in someone else's cart? They'd be charged the wrong price for the item.
The way McDonald's does this that they essentially offer discounts that you can only get by using the mobile app, and the mobile app can dynamically price your cart however they wish. All they (or any other business) has to do is to increase their non-mobile prices to squeeze out non-identifiable shopping.
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
If we're including promotions or membership discounts, then coupons fit this definition of price discrimination. And those have existed since the 90s at least.
The problems show up when different people don't have access to the same coupons published by the store. Most coupons are fine.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy.
This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to implement price discrimination. Basic ESLs cost $3 to $12, depending on size and use very little energy. Adding a camera means more energy, so a bigger battery and more cost.
Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
I think viewing it at as a discount is framing it wrong. It’s more a fee for not using the app, and if you use the app you’ll get charged the highest price McDonald’s has decided you will pay.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
I think McDonalds dynamic pricing is great. Every time I checkout the app there is some crazy deal. Sure its not always something I want but I'm not necessarily competing w/ the other items on the menu. If there's no deal on something I want, I check BK or similar chains.
> It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I don't think it should be allowed. It's predatory. It allows a company like Uber and Lyft to see things like "Oh, you are going to a hospital, then I'm going to apply a 10% surcharge because you are probably desperate".
It also works against the drivers. Uber/Lyft see things like "This person is logged on for 8 hours, they are desperate, so let's give them lower rates and worse routes."
Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.
I'm not. alex43578 was shifting the goalposts from the point cogman10 was making; I acknowledged what he said, but it was besides the point. An airline charging differently depending on the time ahead of flight is sensible. An airline charging differently depending on the buyer's home address is discrimination.
You said "charging two people for the same route differently" is bad: airlines do that constantly and that's why there's dozens of fare changes, fare buckets, sales, codeshares, etc.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
I suppose you are misunderstanding me on purpose, but let me try again in very clear terms anyway: Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust.
What you are referring to is 'price discrimination'[1]. @alex43578 is correct in his examples. In the 'Uber/Lyft' example, his metric for service similarity in the case of a ride to the airport vs. the middle of nowhere can be seen in the distance driven. The problem is that arguments can always be made on why pricing one demographic vs another makes business sense.
In the case of Uber/Lyft, the company can say a ride to the middle of nowhere costs more than a hotspot destination because the odds of finding someone hailing another ride from there are low. This would mean the driver would have to spend more on gas picking up their next customer. Although this seems reasonable, it's probabilistic in nature. This may also not be the case, but the company must price this risk to keep their drivers happy. Well what of the case where the destination is a dangerous neighborhood where the driver feels like their life will be in danger? How do we price the risk then? And that says nothing about the possible mismatch of perception between the seller and the customer.
How about if a grocery store sells goods at a higher price to customers in lower income areas because they notice that it lowers the number of high income area customers to the point they make less profit? Is it right for that store to raise the price for identifiably lower income area customer to make up for the lost profit?
> Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust
Your statement includes things like loyalty programs and memberships. Presenting these credentials at checkout means customers are willingly giving the company "prior knowledge about them" (that they've shopped at the store before and how much they're willing to spend) unrelated to the *specific* food or service they're purchasing. Should these practices be allowed?
The point of this reply isn't to say what should or shouldn't be allowed, it's to show that I believe the issue is more nuanced than you can account for in your statement of what constitutes unjust business practices.
Why is it unjust? It’s absolutely the store or individual’s choice to charge what they want to who they want, assuming that they aren’t discriminating against a protected class.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
Just for clarification: Does this affect intraday price changes, and how much if this is AI vs. 'standard database operations'?
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
It’s hard to talk about without sounding conspiratorial because it literally is an unfounded conspiracy. The impracticalities of this scheme are immediately obvious and no evidence of it ever actually being implemented in physical retail exists.
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
Which supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
It’s likely just posturing for political support. No nation-wide law that I’m aware of exists in the US. In my state, the lowest advertised or displayed price is the honored price. They have to update the shelf price before the register’s. Any difference gets a refund which unfortunately is not automatic. Requires vigilance by the consumer but it would prevent this type of AI pricing.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines
the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services
Ok.
Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
The problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
>And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks.
Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
Like I personally don't know every single price at every single shop before I go, but I do know for example that Henry's Mercato or the Big Watermelon will have some kind of cheap bulk fruit, Aldi has cheaper staples, Springvale has the best fish etc. etc.
There are plenty of other places I checked out once or twice and then wrote off as a bad deal.
> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
Bingo. Exactly. In every one of these oligopolies, the most customer-hostile behaviors spread quickly and completely, and any customer-friendly ideas anyone sneaks in fizzle out quickly.
Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way.
This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
use a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time).
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
No, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
In most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
Regarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
> What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation?
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
It's "bigger" in the sense it spends more money per capita. Something very American exceptionalist about the OP suggesting that this is somehow more relevant than it covering fewer people and treatments.
> life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
https://archive.is/2026.05.01-224445/https://www.nytimes.com...
Deeply divisive political topics driving a wedge between Americans - midterms must be coming up.
If in the next 6 months you find yourself inexpliciavly angry at other working class Americans and being convinced that the solution to your problem is to take a stand on a black and white issue you just learned about in the last 10 minutes - congratulations, Americas bipartisan politcal virus has infected you!
The cure is to go into hiding until November.
This actually seems like a pretty uniting issue. I haven't seen many politicians of any party openly come out in favor of the sort of price discrimination banned by this bill.
Came to say the same thing. Though calling it 'price discrimination' will bring out the MAGAs who will reflexively conclude that banning it must be woke/DEI and then demand to have it everywhere. Better to call it 'diverse pricing' to get the opposite reaction.
Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
In my country prices are often wrong because supermarkets are run by a small team of literal teenagers (one of the downsides of having decent minimum wages is that nobody wants to hire anyone if they somehow can avoid it).
> The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time.
Is an if-statement considered AI?
So membership discounts should be banned?
What is a "membership discount" (assuming you don't mean coupons) in the context of a grocery store? Can you give an example of a major grocery store that has one?
For what it's worth,
> The bill clarifies that certain practices, such as promotional pricing, loyalty programs, or price differences based on objective costs like shipping, are not considered prohibited dynamic pricing.
Harris Teeter is an example of a large chain that has promotions (not coupons) that are applied at checkout only if you have your VIC card (their free membership program). There’s a lot of BOGO, a few dollars off etc offers that are tagged to the price label throughout the store.
I used to shop at HT at the last place I lived. It was always crazy seeing all of those discounts pop up. I don't know if I was actually saving money over the other stores nearby but it certainly felt like it. Honestly, I like shopping at Lidl now. My grocery bill always feels much cheaper. I don't get much savings using my phone number, I think they want you to clip coupons on the app but I still walk out paying less than I would elsewhere. A large portion of the stuff at Lidl are not major brands, I suspect they are the companies that produce white label products for store brands.
Got it, thank you for the example. That seems to be still allowed by the bill.
The behavior targeted here seems to be more like "Our data indicates this person is poor and desperate, let's charge them more for rice and beans than we charge other people, since that's most of what they'll buy. We've calculated that we can charge up to $X to exhaust their budget/foodstamps and they'll still buy."
In Europe every big chain of stores has loyalty programs and they are busy throwing coupons and discounts. And I don't think they are under any obligation to make sure that they offer the same coupons to everyone.
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).
That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.
> If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
How would you do it if pricing is dynamic and changes every day?
By the time competitor finds out about the price, you might have already reduced it, making it look like theirs is more expensive even after they applied discount.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
Keep in mind: the only thing a capitalist fears is a truly free market.
The highest ROI for any business is to buy their own politician. That allows you to block competition and other inconveniences at a legislative level.
It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
I think that opaque pricing is bad in that it creates a feeling of helplessness in the customer, is annoying and after every deal it makes you feel like you have been ripped off. Like the - call us to get a quote on some sites instead of direct pricing.
To a lesser extent it is the same with loyalty programs - my grocery stores often discount items to 50% and on my receipt it there is usually something like - you saved 20 Euro - which could be 20 to 30% of the bill. A lesser mind than the average consumer's may suspect that they keep all the prices permanently inflated by 20 to 30% and if some schmuck dare to buy their favorite cheese when not discounted - it is on them.
Rent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!
With both parties scrambling to buy non-taxpayer votes with taxpayer money, the list is endless. Free healthcare, free tuition, pork barrel spending, wars on behalf of other nations, lavish benefits for your ethnic group’s immigrants, etc.
You believe that poor people don't 'pay taxes', even though all of their money and excess labor value is definitionally recirculated into the economy or back to the government?
You believe in the world's most expensive healthcare, the world's most expensive universities(/hedge funds), corrupt spending on corporations, wars on behalf of the empire, and our vassal states, and 'lavish' benefits for only corporations and white people (as has been the case since we invented whiteness)?
Am I correctly understanding that this status quo is your preference?
I'm also curious which benefit is specifically 'lavish'. The only social programs I'd describe as such are the programs that create billionaires.
Or do you just think that politicians shouldn't talk about rent, fuel, and food prices?
Or is your contention that the working poor just stupid for believing anything will ever get better in our two party system?
I mean it's very likely the MAGAcult literally just writes checks to people with Dear Leader's face/signature on them going into the midterms.
That seems bad.
What could possibly go wrong?
This is the answer.
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.
They should leave dynamic pricing. The rich could then hire poor people to do their shopping. Everybody wins. This is semi sarcastic. In chasing absolute maximum returns they open themselves for eventual gaming of the system.
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
How would that work? The barcode on the item doesn't get rewritten, the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item. Even if they did assign unique barcodes to each item, what happens if you take the item off the shelf, and put it in someone else's cart? They'd be charged the wrong price for the item.
The way McDonald's does this that they essentially offer discounts that you can only get by using the mobile app, and the mobile app can dynamically price your cart however they wish. All they (or any other business) has to do is to increase their non-mobile prices to squeeze out non-identifiable shopping.
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
If we're including promotions or membership discounts, then coupons fit this definition of price discrimination. And those have existed since the 90s at least.
The problems show up when different people don't have access to the same coupons published by the store. Most coupons are fine.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
Your plan fails in a few ways.
Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy.
This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to implement price discrimination. Basic ESLs cost $3 to $12, depending on size and use very little energy. Adding a camera means more energy, so a bigger battery and more cost.
Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
I think viewing it at as a discount is framing it wrong. It’s more a fee for not using the app, and if you use the app you’ll get charged the highest price McDonald’s has decided you will pay.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-...
part of the reason I don't go there anymore. I noticed recently taco bell in my area no longer asks about their app, just takes my order.
I think McDonalds dynamic pricing is great. Every time I checkout the app there is some crazy deal. Sure its not always something I want but I'm not necessarily competing w/ the other items on the menu. If there's no deal on something I want, I check BK or similar chains.
The article says loyalty programs and https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/H... makes no mention of this store restriction. Just retailer.
It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I expect the outcome of this to be prices raised for everyone and then loyalty discounts per group.
> It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I don't think it should be allowed. It's predatory. It allows a company like Uber and Lyft to see things like "Oh, you are going to a hospital, then I'm going to apply a 10% surcharge because you are probably desperate".
It also works against the drivers. Uber/Lyft see things like "This person is logged on for 8 hours, they are desperate, so let's give them lower rates and worse routes."
Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
That's one thing, but charging two people for the same route differently is what the parent comment was getting at, and I agree with them.
You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.
I'm not. alex43578 was shifting the goalposts from the point cogman10 was making; I acknowledged what he said, but it was besides the point. An airline charging differently depending on the time ahead of flight is sensible. An airline charging differently depending on the buyer's home address is discrimination.
You said "charging two people for the same route differently" is bad: airlines do that constantly and that's why there's dozens of fare changes, fare buckets, sales, codeshares, etc.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
I suppose you are misunderstanding me on purpose, but let me try again in very clear terms anyway: Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust.
What you are referring to is 'price discrimination'[1]. @alex43578 is correct in his examples. In the 'Uber/Lyft' example, his metric for service similarity in the case of a ride to the airport vs. the middle of nowhere can be seen in the distance driven. The problem is that arguments can always be made on why pricing one demographic vs another makes business sense.
In the case of Uber/Lyft, the company can say a ride to the middle of nowhere costs more than a hotspot destination because the odds of finding someone hailing another ride from there are low. This would mean the driver would have to spend more on gas picking up their next customer. Although this seems reasonable, it's probabilistic in nature. This may also not be the case, but the company must price this risk to keep their drivers happy. Well what of the case where the destination is a dangerous neighborhood where the driver feels like their life will be in danger? How do we price the risk then? And that says nothing about the possible mismatch of perception between the seller and the customer.
How about if a grocery store sells goods at a higher price to customers in lower income areas because they notice that it lowers the number of high income area customers to the point they make less profit? Is it right for that store to raise the price for identifiably lower income area customer to make up for the lost profit?
> Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust
Your statement includes things like loyalty programs and memberships. Presenting these credentials at checkout means customers are willingly giving the company "prior knowledge about them" (that they've shopped at the store before and how much they're willing to spend) unrelated to the *specific* food or service they're purchasing. Should these practices be allowed?
The point of this reply isn't to say what should or shouldn't be allowed, it's to show that I believe the issue is more nuanced than you can account for in your statement of what constitutes unjust business practices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Why is it unjust? It’s absolutely the store or individual’s choice to charge what they want to who they want, assuming that they aren’t discriminating against a protected class.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
They meant something more specific by "route".
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
Just for clarification: Does this affect intraday price changes, and how much if this is AI vs. 'standard database operations'?
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
It’s interesting, no matter what the sign says, the cost is determined at the checkout. I think you missed the point.
This is about profiling people buying through apps.
I guess it’s neat someone is trying to do something about grocery prices, this won’t move the needle. Still nice to have in the books.
Now if only the governer could figure out how to get the Key bridge built instead of firing the company and starting over… that would be cool.
“Yeah it’ll be built by 2028!” At this point I doubt it’ll be finished in my lifetime.
This is possible in retail, or will soon be.
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
The electronic shel labels use e-ink. Their refresh time is around 30 seconds. What happens if two shoppers are looking at the same product?
From my comment:
> Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
Since you get a location and time stamped receipt these shenanigans would be completely trivial to detect.
It’s hard to talk about without sounding conspiratorial because it literally is an unfounded conspiracy. The impracticalities of this scheme are immediately obvious and no evidence of it ever actually being implemented in physical retail exists.
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
They charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you
Which supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
Because the sole driver of all of this is the UFCW. That's why only grocery stores.
Because they're still mad they think it "takes away jobs" to put in electronic ink price tags.
That's it. They came up with the rest of the FUD and latched onto clueless lawmakers.
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
It’s likely just posturing for political support. No nation-wide law that I’m aware of exists in the US. In my state, the lowest advertised or displayed price is the honored price. They have to update the shelf price before the register’s. Any difference gets a refund which unfortunately is not automatic. Requires vigilance by the consumer but it would prevent this type of AI pricing.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services
Ok.
Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
Slogans and bromides are good starting points but not solutions.
The government IS preventing coordinated price setting by closing the loophole of third party data brokers.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
The problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
>And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks.
Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
Like I personally don't know every single price at every single shop before I go, but I do know for example that Henry's Mercato or the Big Watermelon will have some kind of cheap bulk fruit, Aldi has cheaper staples, Springvale has the best fish etc. etc.
There are plenty of other places I checked out once or twice and then wrote off as a bad deal.
> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
Bingo. Exactly. In every one of these oligopolies, the most customer-hostile behaviors spread quickly and completely, and any customer-friendly ideas anyone sneaks in fizzle out quickly.
Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way.
This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
Right, which would imply that a VPN that makes you look broke would help get you better prices.
Haha, no no no. I don't trust this to be true. Everyone will pay more or else the investment into this technology doen't break even.
Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
They’ll require ID verification for everything. Like they are normalizing with age verification for social media
How’s that gonna work when they know your address?
I'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
use a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time).
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
I have residence in Bulgaria and I do not necessarily agree with that statement. Glad it works for you though
I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
What about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
This doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
I think people are often just logged in for years and forget they're reading a paid resource.
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
Note for people who don't know:
They profile you and offer discounts based on your past purchases
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
The ban is specifically on adjusting prices _per-consumer_ based on data known/collected/stolen/assumed about the consumer.
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
You think this is like 1800s levels of economic development?
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
Which is wild, because things like car dealerships, airline tickets and many more do it already.
Not to mention seniors discounts, active military, and all kinds of things.
Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
The end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
And also to eliminate all competition who doesn't have enough money to compete
No, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
> the unhealthier you are, the more you pay.
I'd re-write that as "the more you consume the more you pay". Seems normal.
In most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
Should there be any consumer surplus?
Regarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
> Most of Europe has this problem solved.
With paracetamol :)
(Dutch people know what I am talking about)
For those of us who aren't Dutch, please enlighten
> What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation?
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
The US also pays relatvely more, not just absolute. Where could I see the US system delivering then? Not sure the data is so clear cut there.
> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
It's "bigger" in the sense it spends more money per capita. Something very American exceptionalist about the OP suggesting that this is somehow more relevant than it covering fewer people and treatments.
> life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
>the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country.
Probably because Europeans commenting don't know how big Medicare and Medicaid are.
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
This seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
That shit is evil
Yes, and it's already in many places where possible, e.g. taxi, airlines, online stores and services, insurance, health, etc.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951007
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?