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- cross-posted to:
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The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.
“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.
Apps like Uber already use surge pricing, in which higher demand leads to higher prices in real time. Companies across industries have caused controversy with talk of implementing surge pricing, with fast-food restaurant Wendy’s making headlines most recently. Electronic shelf labels allow the same strategy to be applied at grocery stores, but are not the only reason why retailers may make the switch.
How is this not considered false advertising? You go to a shelf and see your favorite snack on sale, you grab it. Finish the rest of your selections and go to check out.
By the time you get there the price of your snack is no longer what was shown on the shelf.
If it isn’t false advertising, it’s bait and switch.
It’s worse than that, if they have shelf scanners they could see cans of peas just went from 4 to 3 so they then increase price because of the demand you yourself just created.
Having just recently worked at a grocery store, they’re likely shooting for being able to change prices daily without having to pay 3 extra workers to change all the tags in the grocery store. So it likely wont change during the day, for the reasons you listed, but any chance they get to up the price without a percieved loss in customers, they’ll just hit a button and bam, jacked the price by a dollar
They’re not meant to be used to change prices on the fly. The 10 minute window is literally just so you can fix mistakes like typos, in case it says 179.9 when you meant to put 17.99. Like when a customer comes in, and says “the advertising said this is supposed to be $5 this weekend, but the price tag still says its $8, what gives?” Then you can go to the back, change the price to $5, and it will update all the tags for this item on the fly. There is no limitation stating you need to wait 24 hours or however long you think would be fair. You can also use it to schedule sales that start at a specific time of day, fx food items that are made to be consumed on the same day might get cheaper near closing time.
Price gouging is still price gouging, and generally, at least where im from, there is a legal obligation that the customer can rely on the listed price at the time they pick up the item. I can’t imagine it’s that much different in the us?
Source: l literally used to program the software that’s used for these things
Though I agree that it’s likely not how they were designed, but capitalists must do a capitalism.
When the fine for doing exactly this, is a small portion of the increased profits (and only after it’s discovered, and prosecuted), then it’s just another way to do said capitalism.