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

nytimes.com

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

#211

Post by Rury »

estearum wrote: post #149
elil17 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 legislatio…

> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers

This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

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

#212

Post by jasonlotito »

hermannj314 wrote: post #184
jasonlotito wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is coming off as something I would see in r/iamverysmart. I only see this coming from people that self-declared "independents" who try to play the "both sides" card and won't ever stand for anything. Which really just says everything you need to know. (If this isn't you, don't worry! The comment just comes across as an indicator.) That you would bring this up here is odd. This topic is hardly deeply divisive, no…

The topic of AI surveillance pricing is almost exclusively covered by left-leaning media sources according to ground news and party affiliation largely predicted the vote with no 100% of voting Democratic legislators for and 88% of voting republicans against it. It feels like a partisan issue. But I guess I don't read the news.

> But I guess I don't read the news.

No, you don't. Since you rely on AI to do the thinking for you.

> It feels like a partisan issue.

It feels like a non-partisan issue. There, debunked.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

jasonlotito wrote: post #212
hermannj314 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic of AI surveillance pricing is almost exclusively covered by left-leaning media sources according to ground news and party affiliation largely predicted the vote with no 100% of voting Democratic legislators for and 88% of voting republicans against it. It feels like a partisan issue. But I guess I don't read the news.

> But I guess I don't read the news. No, you don't. Since you rely on AI to do the thinking for you. > It feels like a partisan issue. It feels like a non-partisan issue. There, debunked.

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by estearum »

wernsey wrote: post #209
estearum wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 legislatio…

What happens in practice that there are only so many grocery stores where consumers can choose to shop thanks to corporate mergers and lax antitrust enforcement. So if all of them raise their prices at the same time then those consumers are out of luck. Now technically it would be illegal for the grocery stores to collude in price fixing like that, but they'll hide behind the fact that all of them will buy their surv…

Sure, but none of this is related to dynamic pricing

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

#215

Post by estearum »

Throaway199999 wrote: post #204
estearum wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these are separate issues from dynamic pricing

You were not asking about dynamic pricing. You were asking why you weren't able to see the reason that consumers don't always find & choose the cheapest option. The person you were responding to was explaining the unethical realities of food retailers. There's no reason why these would disappear with dynamic pricing.

No, the entire conversation is about a change toward dynamic pricing. My comment about pricing is that dynamic pricing doesn't change the competitive dynamic between retailers. You are chiming in and saying "well there are other competitive/noncompetitive dynamics at play," which I agree with and never disputed and am not talking about.

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

#216

Post by estearum »

Throaway199999 wrote: post #203
estearum wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I assume that if anyone can bring bottled water to market, they should have a strong incentive to do so whenever there is a strong need for more of it.

But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers. As well, these things are often blocked to newcomers because of existing deals with big players.

> But they (everybody) can't. Bringing bottled water to market requires a clean source, rights to acquire it, and a manufacture & distribution network. Plus retailers.

I didn't say everybody. I said anybody who can.

What you describe is exactly why it's important to have an incentive for the people who do have those resources to employ them towards getting bottled water to this lead-poisoned region...

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

#217

Post by estearum »

Rury wrote: post #211
estearum wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 legislatio…

> the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers This is an assumption that doesn't necessarily have to happen. Some markets remain uncompetitive, otherwise you would see every market collapse to 0 margins if this were always true.

Sure but dynamic pricing doesn't change anything about that.

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

#218

Post by paulddraper »

PearlRiver wrote: post #154
technothrasher wrote: post #131

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 true minimum wage is zero.

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

#219

Post by danielmarkbruce »

antiframe wrote: post #50
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Sure but they weren't trying to price per category, they were trying to grab as much of the area under the demand curve as possible. Given what was possible, that's all they could do.

There is a market solution to this - don't shop at places which do it. If I go to the supermarket and they jack up the price of bread because I'm in a rush and 40 something wearing a suit I'm likely to spew venom, pay that one time, and never, ever come back.

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

#220

Post by danlitt »

estearum wrote: post #165
danlitt wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Your evil case is not evil The point of pricing water to that level is that it would induce other people who have access to bottled water to bring it to that market, as is desirable

> The point of pricing water to that level is...

No, the point is to selfishly profit-maximise. I'm not trying to be difficult in saying that. The thing you describe is not the intent, it's the hypothetical effect. It may or may not do that (I don't think it typically does, take toilet paper during COVID for example).

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