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Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

theguardian.com

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Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#161

Post by ChuckMcM »

crazygringo wrote: post #44

Sadly, this article doesn't explain how this "surveillance pricing" (which is just a scarier-sounding synonym for "dynamic pricing") would even work in a physical grocery store. Like, prices are displayed on the shelf for everyone to see. And they have to match what you pay at checkout. So how the heck would a grocery store even do this? And this law is specifically around grocery stores . Like, there was a big kerfu…

Its a much bigger problem on things like Amazon. My expectation is that Amazon would come under the provisions of this law if the buyer was in Maryland. One the most annoying things about Amazon is looking at different prices using a browser with no history and a VPN putting you in a different zip code, than the same product on your browser where they can see where you are coming from and know who you are.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#162

Post by redsocksfan45 »

chowells wrote: post #152
crazygringo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're implying that Wendy's was going to offer different prices to different customers "on the fly", but that wasn't the case. It was store-wide with updated prices shown clearly. Yes it could change on a daily basis, but you would also expect it to be roughly predictable because the whole point is to get more people to come in when it's cheaper. Saying that Wendy's is "pinching pennies" doesn't make…

So... you just apparate at Wendy's instantly without cost when you decide to go? Most of us aren't so lucky. We need to travel there, which takes time and resources. Sometimes we decide to go through the drive-through and there are 5 cars in front of us and soon 3 more behind us blocking us in. When prices are 20% higher than you expected when you finally get to order, do you leave and waste all that time? Do you pay…

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Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#163

Post by clawr »

chowells wrote: post #152
crazygringo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're implying that Wendy's was going to offer different prices to different customers "on the fly", but that wasn't the case. It was store-wide with updated prices shown clearly. Yes it could change on a daily basis, but you would also expect it to be roughly predictable because the whole point is to get more people to come in when it's cheaper. Saying that Wendy's is "pinching pennies" doesn't make…

So... you just apparate at Wendy's instantly without cost when you decide to go? Most of us aren't so lucky. We need to travel there, which takes time and resources. Sometimes we decide to go through the drive-through and there are 5 cars in front of us and soon 3 more behind us blocking us in. When prices are 20% higher than you expected when you finally get to order, do you leave and waste all that time? Do you pay…

I'd begrudgingly pay the extra dollar and stop going for lunch

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#164

Post by redsocksfan45 »

foxyv wrote: post #77
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked online and can't find any real examples of QR code-only stores. It seems like QR codes are growing in popularity as a way to look up more product details, user reviews, etc. -- especially at electronics stores. But the idea of prices being hidden entirely doesn't seem to exist anywhere in normal consumer stores. There seem to have been some store experiments and retail "concepts" (prototypes not rolled ou…

You see it a lot in "Convenience Stores" at gas stations now. I refuse to purchase anything like this.

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Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#165

Post by zbentley »

BobbyJo wrote: post #107
jbxntuehineoh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave. shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.

Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.

I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing.

To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are socially beneficial, but adopting it as an ideology rather than piecemeal is not). I think your point is generally correct: if your goal is an efficient free market, then price transparency is important. But that's just my hunch as to what the counterargument would be.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#166

Post by zbentley »

Henchman21 wrote: post #45
ngcazz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.

Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.

Citizens in the developed world have been heavily surveilled for decades. All of them. And the penetration/rate of increase of surveillance has been increasing rapidly.

There are plenty of downsides to that, and I don't agree or think it's beneficial, on balance. But "citizens require a lack of surveillance" is far from the present-day truth, or even remotely practical as an aspiration.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#167

Post by zbentley »

saltyoldman wrote: post #145
xnx wrote: post #10

Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.

We need to invert the markets. Show the demand at a specific price the community is willing to pay for a given thing in a given area and let the grocery stores come down to that price, instead of having the markets guess and fail. Like, basically how an exchange works. We should go massively capitalistic with purchasing everything, even gum.

Inelasticity and segmenting "the community" is the problem here, like always.

Demand price-point for antibiotics across the community when the average use-case is a road rash? Low.

Demand price-point for antibiotics for a community member with a life-threatening lung infection? Asymptotically higher.

See also: home insurance during wildfires, water during a drought/heatwave, masks during a pandemic.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#168

Post by BobbyJo »

zbentley wrote: post #165
BobbyJo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.

I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing. To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are so…

The core issue with pure libertarian ideas is that they ignore "shoe leather costs" and the role they play in making consumers "irrational", which the success of a libertarian society depends on.

In this case, plenty of places in the US only have one reasonably close grocery store.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#169

Post by Loughla »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #40
aquir wrote: post #25

This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned

>Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Go to a food market in a developing country, and that is how it works. Everyone is haggling for everything all the time.

Except with haggling, I can talk the price down to keep it in my budget. That's stressful and unnecessary really, but at least there is an avenue to lower the price inherent in the system.

Try haggling at somewhere like wal mart. Go to a cashier, or hell, the store manager and try to get them to reduce the price.

Re: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

#170

Post by throwaway85825 »

Henchman21 wrote: post #45
ngcazz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers require consumer legislation and protections, not further entrenchment of AI oligopolies.

Citizens require a lack of surveillance. Full stop.

Citizens require the ability to surveil the watchers. When flock data was FOIAd for the politicians license plates the flock data was exempted from FOIA so fast.
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