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Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

nytimes.com

21–30 of 259 posts

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#22

[flagged]

Better that you stick to promoting D instead of defending price gouging.

The inevitable result of government setting prices is some combination of:

1. shortages

2. gluts

3. black markets

It doesn't matter what your or my opinion on it is, any more than having an opinion on F=ma. The Law of Supply and Demand is always in play.

There are thousands of years of history on this.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#25

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.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#26

[flagged]

Supply curves are literally predicated on one price for a market.

If by this you mean that standard supply-demand economics can't model price discrimination, which is what's going on here, that's not correct. See, for example, Chapter 10 of David Friedman's Price Theory, where he models price discrimination using supply and demand curves just fine. In terms of this kind of analysis, price discrimination is a way for sellers to try to transfer as much as possible of what would otherwise be consumer surplus, to themselves.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#27
post #15

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?

They’ll require ID verification for everything. Like they are normalizing with age verification for social media

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better that you stick to promoting D instead of defending price gouging.

The inevitable result of government setting prices is some combination of: 1. shortages 2. gluts 3. black markets It doesn't matter what your or my opinion on it is, any more than having an opinion on F=ma. The Law of Supply and Demand is always in play. There are thousands of years of history on this.

This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination. It's forbidding sellers from transferring consumer surplus to themselves by charging a higher price to customers that would be willing to pay a higher price for the same item. But the item is still available to buyers that wouldn't want to pay the higher price--at the lower price. The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them. Whether they will try to find other ways of increasing their profit over what they get when every customer pays the price that's equal to their marginal cost, is a different question.

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#29
post #15

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?

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

Re: Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

#30
post #7

[flagged]

Not sure that is applicable here. 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. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.

That has always happened. If you go to a flea market, do you think the seller isn't going to bump up the price if you look prosperous or desperate? Do you think the roof replacement company isn't going to make a bid based on how wealthy or poor your neighborhood looks? Or you need a new water heater? Do you think grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods charge more?

We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no".

BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?

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