If a grocery store is doing dynamic pricing and you just sit there with a flipper zero recording whatever sub GHz or IR signal they are broadcasting to flip them, take the lowest real displayed price, replay it with idk something like this, is that illegal
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The thread here has been enlightening, with ppl in other countries not being able to imagine the deprativity of US superstores like Whole Foods which are already doing this. It must be nice to live in a place where you aren't getting scammed constantly by the largest corporations in the world in the most grotesque ways possible, I am jealous.
@jonny I'm curious how this works per customer?
How do they connect the price displayed to the customer, and what if it change etc?
In UK we don't have digital prices tags afaik. Maybe the price is "displayed" on a customer price scanner? We have those but they are not common. I suspect people don't used them where they are optional and I'm not sure they are allowed in law to not display prices on the shelves.
I know that you can insist they honour the price on a shelf even if wrong.
@happyborg
Why with the same nightmare in-store surveillance they use for loss prevention, stocking optimization, and customer profiling of course!
@jonny that's how they could customise the price but I'm curious how they manage this from shelf to checkout.
I don't see how it could work in UK. They would have to display different prices to different customers standing in front of the same shelf, and that seems to eliminate the possibility here.
@jonny I've managed to bag a trolley full of nicely priced decent wine in the past.
Wouldn't that violate Asimov's 23rd law of robotics: "any act that interferes with a corporations ability to extract value is illegal." ?
@jonny Very Dynamic Pricing™
@jonny i don't really know anything about this sort of thing, forgive me, but wouldn't there be like a mismatch between the (new) price of the item and whatever value it's stored at on their end, like on their servers?
@tori
Ya I guess this is an important missing piece of the idea: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117205627233769558
@jonny Is it illegal? Most likely. Is it ethical? Sure it is!
@lobingera @jonny Negotiating prices is a thing. Dynamic pricing is other completely different thing that most of the time requires profiling the client and many times can lead to things like price discrimination and spikes during crises. They will of course sell it to you as a way to get better discounts, but of course they will try optimizing profits extracting the most from you.
@doragasu @lobingera right - from pov of the people working there, they know there is fuzz in the prices and that's why there are those "price match guarantees" - so there's some concrete process for them to handle it by just accepting the lower price. they don't know how the cameras track people and align the dynamically displayed prices to people, and have no incentive to enforce that. to them you're just the computers fucking up and it's no money out of their pocket.
@lobingera @doragasu @jonny but how can the cashier decide about the deal? It's only in small village shops that you see the owner there.
As for the legal part, tweaking the shop's price tags smells like theft, and probably can be prosecuted.
@bonkers @lobingera @doragasu assume we are talking about humongous megachain
@jonny Afair the price the cash register displays is the normative i.e. the price you need to pay.
@lobingera some of them have like "if you see a price displayed lower, we'll honor it" so like theoretically if you go around with a gopro and show them all the prices...
@jonny I was just pointing to the legal position in DE (afair it).
Dynamic Pricing in grocery stores is anyway something i think will disappear. Daily updates (overnight), yes, but during the day OR specific to customers is ...
