I’ve already sent feedback to Walmart about my refusal to buy anything with a digital price tag. The thing is, I believe them when they say that prices are only updated between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. The problem is that that policy could change literally any time.
Walmart has every inch of their store covered in cameras. They have facial recognition systems so they know who I am the moment I walk in the store. They know I buy graham crackers. They know I’ve put up with price increases in the past. What is preventing them from adding $0.10 to those graham crackers’ price tag the moment I walk down the crackers aisle? Literally nothing. They could, and that’s reason enough for me to boycott
Personally I have been boycotting Walmart for over 15 years because they refuse to hire most of their employees full time so as to dodge having to provide mandated health insurance and they have a long history of completely screwing the lives of people who use their automated check out system.
Couldn’t pay me to shop at their horrible stores. FUCK Walmart and FUCK the Walton family who’ve become billionaires off the back of poor people in America.
Yeah, my problem is that I’m too poor to shop elsewhere. So far my local Kroger is only a little more expensive, but at least I know that everyone is paying $8.49 for that six pack of graham crackers
Unfortunately that is by design. Walmart actively works to close down local stores and corners the market on wholesalers to control the price so they are the lowest price in any area. Only ones that can usually stand up to them or places like Aldi.
The fact that the other guy who buys the same crackers, but they know they have to give a $0.10 discount so that he’ll buy a beer with it, is also walking down the same aisle. That is likely what would prevent them.
If they want to do dynamic pricing, maybe we’ll just have to start dynamic shopping.
It’s weird, the higher the prices get, the worse my memory and aptitude with self service checkouts gets.
Don’t you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?
these gonna get hacked…
Hacking a pricetag would do fk all, just leads to more people scanning it and getting a shock at the higher actual price.
Someone could hack it to make all the prices $1000, no one would know the prices and then ultimately probably not buy anything.
I will buy that for a dollar. (no really lettuce for a $1 is worth the hack)
Is anybody acting like this is new? Shops relabel stuff with price changes regularly, this just makes it quicker and easier - staff don’t have to run around for a hour with a price gun and a bunch of shelf labels any more.
Improving how we display prices isn’t the issue, that’s a good move, it’s how prices are decided that are the problem.
This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.
How would that work? I go to a shop and I know the price of what they are selling. It is not so easy to rapidly change prices without people noticing. There may be variations on vegetables, fish and meat according to availability but everything else has a clear price. Some products do have some seasonality or good and bad years but when I go to the shop I’ll mostly be accounting for those. It would be quite strange to go to the shop one day and buy something for 5€, the following time for 6€ and another time for 4€. You see, if I know this system is in place I will just not buy it whenever it is at an higher price. Moreover, changing prices while shopping is probably illegal. I am not sure about this, but I believe in Europe large shops are obligated to clearly state the price for every product. By changing the price several times per hour I do not think that would comply with such regulations. While personalised pricing itself may be legal, and I’m not sure it is, changing the stated prices while people are shopping probably isn’t. Besides, when I check out how will they charge me? This is 6€, no it was 5€ yesterday, you see the price changed to 6 while you were walking in front of it but it now is at 4€.
Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.
Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw
And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/
Well but r/n you can’t adjust the price of butter 3x a day.
(maybe you can but it’s stuff u don’t see. With this tech, I’d be worried they’ll change the price multiple times a day to minimize my wallet)
I agree that the technology isn’t the problem here. It’s the corporate mentality of trying to squeeze customers for all they are worth on a personal basis that is the big issue. That and surge pricing should be made illegal. Having to pay more for a thing just because a flock of other people decide to get it at the same time you do is absurd.
Abandoned grocery carts full of food might also be coming to my local supermarket.
My local store can not even get a reliable source of staple foods (the distributor often shorts them milk, meat or whatever), there is no way this:
A) Works
B) Is adopted by any non large store
C) Is accepted as anything but a hated cash grab
I’ve already seen them in several stores near me, including Walmart. The entire store was switched over to them.
Do cost accounting and play fair. Will we be doing this short-change shit forever?
What’s the common way for updating these? I have some similar devices that use Wi-Fi but local stores seem to use some sort of nearby transmitter pointex towards the shelves, maybe infrared/optical
It will probably be wifi and mqtt. You don’t need a whole OS to get mqtt, just a TCP/IP stack.
Possibly it will use BTLE or BT5. If the store is large enough it might make sense for staff to go around with android app and manually update some prices, in which case BT5 in SPP mode might make sense.
probably they set certain times of day where there will be surge pricing, like around 12-1pm where more people come in for lunch, and around 4-5pmish where people off work.
They seem to use infrared and or NFC for data exchange. I tried to read the NFC data with a phone app, however the data seems to be either encrypted, or it was some sort of image blob file that is shown on the display. You can read something, but it’s not as trivial as reading other NFC tags.
It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:
Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:
- sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
- stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.
Once dynamic pricing is ultimately accepted as the norm, what is the lowest price? Also, if you have the ability to instantly correct pricing “mistakes”, then you never have to stop selling the product. There’s no penalty for gouging people until someone notices, and you can instantly revert to a known tolerable price and start over.
If dynamic pricing is legal, and accepted by the consumer, whether as frequent expected pricing fluctuations, or the worst case scenario of personalised pricing, these protections may well be unenforceable.
What law? In what country?
Australia, the country the article is talking about. That was a quote from the ACCC website.
The closest thing I can think of would be Quebec, they have some fairly strong consumer protections, but i don’t know how far they would extend in cases like this
stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected
Not a lawyer but couldn’t they just refuse to sell it to you? We all know it would be bullshit but couldn’t a company say “Oh that minimum wage clerk made a mistake, but don’t blame them, just an honest mistake.”
Or is the law, if it’s on the shelf, it must be honored?
They would have to refuse to sell to anyone. It would likely not be lawful to leave it on the shelf and sell it at the higher price to someone else who might not have noticed the discrepancy, until they fix up the shelf pricing.
I will institute my own “dynamic pricing” scheme if this ever happens
Is it really dynamic if the price is always “free”?
surely negative numbers are in the cards? since we deserve the compensation for all the trouble
Wait for all the codeberg projects tryna break these things
Finally, a practical reason to have a flipper zero or similar.
Haha, that’s a perfect application for an otherwise almost useless (but incredible) device
If the price changes for them specifically, yes. That’s the entire concept they’re pushing here.
Its much easier than you’d think.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m obviously not gonna steal anything. Sure, accidents happen from time to time. The supermarket decided to replace their cashiers with self checkout operated by random non-employees, after all. If I happen to ring up filet mignon as a Roma tomato, I think that’s just the inevitable result of outsourcing your labor to untrained civilians with no incentive to accurately do the job .
Self checkout is only a valid option if you are stealing. No, I’m not going to do your job to increase your profits by having less employees. Fuck those things.
This reminds me of Bill Burr’s bit on the subject… “Twenty years, I thought I was a standup comedian. Now apparently I’m moonlighting as a fucking bag boy.”
remember if you see someone shoplifting food no the fuck you didnt
Especially if you work there.
honestly the best part about working at a supermarket was delivery day when i could weave through the maze of pallets and sleep on the paper towels behind everything like a fort. i sure as fuck aren’t going to report anyone shoplifting food.
Thank you for your service in working minimum effort at a giant corpo
Dynamic pricingPrice gouging. FTFY.If my local store switches to digital price tags to do this I’m just going to gather as many as I can and flush them down the toilet.
It’s a nice thought but good luck not getting caught on the 3k cameras in the store and following you to your car.
It would be a shame if your phone was infected by a malware that rewrites all the prices in the tags in your vicinity.
Why is everything suddenly $800.85? :-P
These tags are e-ink, so there could be monochrome pictures!
Haha, ASCII schlongs begone! Now there are pictures.
Of course I wouldn’t be doing it without some preparation.
Security cameras in stores are kept purposely garbage so they don’t get bugged by the police to provide footage to them. Unless something changed in the last decade since I worked in a retail joint.
It has definitely changed a lot
I can tell you from personal experience that there exists a very happy corporate servant who is happy to give footage to police. The security cameras in some stores are shit because the owner is cheap (this is the case with most gas stations).
Why would they care?
My local Woolies has had e-ink tags for at least two years, maybe more. Between this and Coles hiring Palantir, we mostly shop at Aldi. Bunnings and Kmart using facial recognition as if it’s no biggie as well. How long until they partner with CBA to check your credit card limit as you stand in front of the bananas to see how much you’ll pay?
They’re opening an Aldi’s near me. I’m excited.
Aldi’s is the shit. No bloat, no bs, just groceries. They don’t have some stuff, but for the staples you’re set. I usually go to the more traditional grocery store every 4th trip or so.
Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.
Dynamic sounds way more fun!
I’m still not clear on exactly what triggers this. Is it phone location, because a phone number is linked to all your data (unless you’ve been gaming it for the last 5-10yrs)? Do I walk by with my phone and the price goes up?
Is it like goodwill? Does the price change as you’re checking out? Do I grab a 2lb bag of medium roast coffee beans for $13, and because buying it consistently for decades, it’s now $18 at checkout? But is still $13 for the guy behind me who decided to try whole bean over pre-ground?
If rich people turn off their phones before hitting the parking lot and poor people leave theirs on, does the entire store get cheaper?
If you take a pic with your phone of the “advertised” price does that mitigate sudden increases while checking out, if you’re even watching?
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
What are the triggers?
We’ve had them for quite some time. They don’t change price for individual customers, I don’t think they change the price in the middle of the day either. But, I guess, they can change the prices just before opening, like if the wether service forecasts a rainy day they could rise the price of umbrellas and raincoats. Cold? Hot chocolate and soups. Hot? Ice cream and cold drinks. Certain asshole died overnight? Champaign and confetti cannons through the roof. And so on…
Oh, you mean price gouging
Oh, no no no. It’s called “capitalism”. Supply and demand pricing at it’s finest! /s
They don’t currently, but they could.
Take brand x on the shelf. Sold for $5 at a profit of $1. They sell 10 per week. You buy 2 if those every week, on Wednesday at about 6pm. Why not make them $5.50 next Wednesday and see what happens. Normal price on other days as no pattern identified.
Then once that’s successful, why not have beacons detecting your phone, or even the stores app feeding your location. Then they can update just for the hours you are there.
Oh, but you’ll say you swore it said $5 when you picked it off the shelf. The worker will say they have to charge what’s there now and what it scanned as. Your choice to purchase it or go look for something else.
They’ve already started all this crap with online purchasing. It’s just moving it to retail.
The industry calls this “clientelling”
Surge pricing really only works when you put the customer in isolation. Uber can do it because you’re the only one seeing the rate for the trip you want to take. Amazon can do it because you’re shopping while taking a shit at work. Nobody else sees the prices in your online shopping cart, that’s not the case in retail.
The profit motive behind these tags is wage savings. It saves in the time it takes to change out price tags when the prices do change. It saves in the time used in finding and replacing missing or damaged tags. It saves in the amount of manual price corrections at the till when the tag doesn’t match the till because the tag wasn’t updated - or the lost time and revenue if someone abandons their cart because of said disagreement.
Could they do what you’re saying? Technologically speaking, it’s been possible for several years - we’ve had these tags on most major store shelves in Canada for a very long time now and apps tracking our every move. Why hasn’t it happened already? These stores have had everything they need to implement this scheme, and of all the shady cunts in this world, Galen Weston would have by now if it could have turned a profit.
It’s easier to just price-fix the bread and pay a fraction of your profit in lawsuit settlements decades later than to do what you’re describing.
I a shop with 10 products, yes, I’d agree. In a supermarket with thousands of products, they can predict what you’re likely to buy if you’re a regular customer and you might be the only one buying those items that day.
I don’t expect them to do it overnight. First they roll them out for the cost savings. Just like they did with barcodes rather than price labels. Then they start to look at other savings or profit centres.
After a while it becomes, why wouldn’t they do it?
Why go through the trouble of gaslighting someone with digital price tags somehow changing the price on the fly based on whoever happens to be looking at it (BTW, what happens if two people with different price profiles are looking at the tag at the same time?), when they could just remove the tags entirely or even more likely, just close the store and force you to shop online where they can do all the usual online price fuckery?
Some countries require pricing to be visible. I would assume, just like online, they will use algorithms and ai to figure out what price point gives the most profit. Its only trouble to set up. The corporate world doesn’t look at trouble. They look at cost. If the return investment is positive, they do it. If it’s high, they do it as a priority.
Not all retail is online. Much is but not all. Groceries is one that is often better in person for that evenings meal on the way home from work. It’s led to the rise of metro style supermarkets near transport hubs.
Grocery is already going online, look at all the companies sponsoring youtube vids. The margins for what you’re describing are, at the absolute best, razor-thin.
E-tags draw significantly more profit from things like one-day (loss leader) flash sales, or in-store specials, or other conventional retail pricing tactics.
Take a 4-hour sale on some popular product, put an ad up on Instagram to get people in your store on the way home from work and you make a mint. You don’t need E-tags to do that, but it means that you don’t have to pay someone to change out the paper tags on that product twice in their shift.
You’re getting distracted by the least likely way they’ll fuck you over, when they’re just sticking to tried-and-true collusion.
surge pricing is what you are referring to which is pretty much the main form of dynamic pricing.
That’s the personalized prices. That’s step two.
This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.
OP was making a lot of shit up.
I can imagine price stickers would update daily, and individual users would get personalized discounts on their app.
App-less buyers would pay the baseline price in the sticker, app users would pay less. Like existing loyalty card programs, but with more data collection
It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.
So, Sunday afternoon being the worst time to grocery shop will Leo be the most expensive time to shop.
Versus 9am on a Wednesday.
Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?
Au contraire
