Majority of Americans Support Ban on Surveillance Pricing and Electronic Shelf Labels
https://gizmodo.com/majority-of-americans-support-ban-on-surveillance-pricing-and-electronic-shelf-labels-2000762717
Majority of Americans Support Ban on Surveillance Pricing and Electronic Shelf Labels
https://gizmodo.com/majority-of-americans-support-ban-on-surveillance-pricing-and-electronic-shelf-labels-2000762717
31 Comments
Imagine Walmart having the ability to do dynamic pricing to charge more for toilet paper because they know you have diarrhea.
> Walmart, which has patented AI-powered price changes, has been rolling out electronic shelf labels across its stores, and it aims to feature them in every U.S. location by the end of 2026. But the company has insisted it’s not going to use ESLs for jacking up prices and insists that a human manager must be in the loop when prices change.
Ahhhhhh. Kill competition and become the defaco face and increase prices to earn back everyone you use to get there and then some.
If the majority of Americans got what they wanted the country would look almost 100% different.
I don’t even mean republicans vs democrats. There are 1000+ issues 90% of Americans agree on but will never make it into law.
“Twenty percent say it will likely just keep prices the same.”
those idiots are worse than the 5% people saying it’ll lead to lower costs. They wouldn’t be doing this if not to lead to either higher or lower (hahaha) costs.
Somehow in other countries electronic shelf labels are quite common (I mean they are just useful and efficient), and no one switching the price for butter or eggs 10 times a day.
I mean if you are worried, then make laws to regulate that, that would also fix the fundamental problem of having unpredictable pricing on basic groceries, instead of banning the electronic shelf labels that are just a tool…
Imagine how awful it’s going to be at the Wal-Mart check out lanes when people get to the register with $25 worth of stuff and find out that it now costs $30 because prices changed since they pulled it off the shelf 10 minutes ago.
Yeah no shit, there is not defense to this for the costumers.
The headline could have ended at “surveillance”
Feels like it would be pretty simple to legislate against this while keeping the practicality of digital price tags. Price changes for brick and mortar retail businesses must occur before opening or after closing, not during business hours, or something along those lines.
Dynamic pricing gone amok.
Hell, let’s make DP illegal while we’re at it.
Electronic shelf labels are objectively good. It’s labor and resources saved.
Surveillance pricing is the problem.
Majority of Americans support a lot of things that we ain’t ever gonna get cause it gets in the way of sweet, sweet profit.
How about a ban on all corporate and government surveillance domestically? When there are literally 100s of Flock cameras and microphones within 1 mile, we have gone beyond any measure of safety and are now in a mass surveillance police state
Ban on electronic shelf labels is kinda dumb
Ban on updating them more than once daily makes sense
As someone who works in the grocery industry, they’re two different issues.
Stores have done dynamic pricing for decades. It’s through this amazing invention called a coupon. It’s a lot easier and less risky to put digital coupons on your account than to dynamically change an ESL to fit whoever is looking at it and hoping that the AI recognition is right and they’re not shopping with someone else and there’s no other glitches.
And what do you do when someone comes to customer service and says the shelf tag said the $59.99 item was actually $29.99? You can’t just have someone run back and check the shelf. You can either take their word for it or risk a complaint to the state.
But ESLs are going to everywhere for a reason. Remember during the COVID labor crunch when a bunch of stores were getting nailed for having incorrect pricing? It’s because putting up shelf labels is a tedious, labor-intensive task, and swapping to digital bypasses the need for all that labor.
Why would they lump together two
distinct concepts (surveillance pricing and electronic labels) in the same question? Because this survey was devised by the UFCW who by their very nature promote jobs for the sake of jobs.
Their conclusion might as well be a lie.
My first thought when I heard about dynamic pricing at Walmart was they’ll jack them up on the first week of the month. Because food stamps
As someone who does price changing for Fred Meyers ( a Kroger store), I want digital tags so bad. The amount of waste every week is phenomenal.
If a majority of Americans support it, it will never, ever happen at the federal level.
I forget, is “price surging” still a thing? I know Wendy’s tried implemented it a while ago.
Who wouldn’t? You can’t know who will benefit and who will lose. It’ll even depend where you shop
Charging one person more than another is price gouging right?
Electronic price tags are not a problem, so long as there’s a way to audit the fact that they’re not surveillance pricing
Yeah but they won’t. Our government has been captured by corporate interests.
Last time I worked retail, I said we should have electronic labels because of the enormous amount of weekly paper waste we had for just one store in terms of printing and re-printing labels and all the printed sticker labels for the weekly sales. It didnt even occur to me that it could be used for these kinds of pricing scams. I guess that lack of evil thinking is why I’m not a big success
Jesus you people are paranoid. Wendy’s replaced fixed menus with TVs and everybody started screaming about dynamic pricing despite the fact that every other fast food chain already made the same change and none of them implemented dynamic pricing. There’s no reason to think Walmart will actually do anything different.
Did anybody ever run across a coke machine that costs more when it’s hot outside ? People were freaking out about that a few years back.
Who in their right mind doesn’t support a ban on surveillance pricing?!
the labels aren’t the problem. it’s that nobody trusts companies not to jack up the price between the aisle and the register
if only “majority of Americans” meant anything anymore.
Unless those “Americans” are lobbyists with lots of money, it doesn’t seem to matter. Just look at the data center issue. and, well, a whole lot of other shit…
I have no issues with an Electronic Shelf Label as long as there’s a matching barcode I can scan with my phone to track it at the time I picked up the product.
I do have many issues with surveillance pricing.
As someone who had to spend an entire day changing the labels once a week I have no problem with electronic labels. So much wasted time, paper and ink.
Ban the surveillance pricing, don’t take down electronic SELs along with it for no good reason.