How do they know what my income is?
If you post your order through an app or a website where you log in first, then it’s not so hard for them to get financial information on you. That’s why I strongly recommend against using, for example, the McDonald’s app. Because they can do price fixing and you will never see it. Of course this is about grocery stores, so it takes a little more effort, but remember that they already have member cards, so all they need is a way to link those member cards to more data, and they can buy that data easily enough.
In other words, the data is already there for the taking. The question is how exactly the scam will unfold. It’s going to unfold, but what will the details be? Pay attention, because it’s going to happen or already is happening to you or people around you.
If they ever enforce using an app for grocery shopping, I will just starve out of spite.
Wow. This is something I knew to be true, just never thought too deep about it. This is how you make people care about privacy, get their money involved. It definitely made me sit up straighter.
If a bank or a CC company scans your face for whatever reason and then shares that info like they do with credit scores by default today - your data will be available on the marketplace
If you aren’t 100% committed to data privacy all the time, which is damn hard to do and live in society, they could probably tell how many pimples you have on your ass and charge accordingly.
Even if you were 100% perfectly committed, there would be all sorts of little signals and things that would leak out enough for them to adjust pricing accordingly. The kind of clothes you’re wearing, the time of day you’re shopping at, your gait, expression, etc.
Even if you were able to perfectly exclude all information about you, it’s possible to gather data from the hole that you leave behind. You aren’t leaving data behind like a lot of other customers, so that would probably make you either old, or privacy-inclined. You’re not buying the same things as an old person, so you’re not old, and you can pick it up from there.
Seven pimples detected applying surge pricing to pimple cream
No not my ass pimple cream
Because they can pay 10 million to a consulting firm to develop a customer-profiling model that predicts their income based on the most recent purchases with a 10% margin of error.
You’d probably be surprised and scared if you knew what companies know about you.
So instead of taxing millionaires fairly… It’s come to this.
How much could a banana cost? Ten dollars???!!!
Go see a star war
I would walk up to a homeless person and invite them to shop together. They can get some for themselves, and I can pay them while saving money
For the love of anything holy. Then they’ll require to install a shitty app to shop at the grocery store in the first place. No, thank you
If I have to install spyware or open a link at a physical location, my top priority is to leave.
I shop at Jewel (which is currently under threat of being taken over by Kroger) and they’re now doing this thing where there will be, for instance, peaches, under a huge sign showing an incredible deal. Then you look at it and realize that the price isn’t discounted at all unless you install a “Jewel App” and use it to “claim” a “digital coupon.”
Big Y in the Northeast does that well. That’s probably the biggest reason why I don’t regularly shop there anymore
I think I still have a “gold coin” floating around somewhere from their previous system.
How is that legal?
Regulatory capture and the Federal Trade Commission asleep at the wheel.
ShopRite by me is doing that.
We mostly stopped buying at ShopRite (mostly, because there are some things we can only get there due to dietary restrictions, and they carry things others don’t).
I don’t think we were the only ones though, because that was gone the last time we were there. It could also be due to the Stop and Shop being “digital coupons only” and being forced to close recently. Don’t know for certain. It could just have been a test run for them and they will bring it back later, no idea.
Either way, I have no interest in having their app on my phone. I toyed with the idea of using a cheap tablet I’ve got and don’t touch to install the app on it and connect to in store wifi only.
Kroger also does that :(
At least with Kroger you don’t have to have the app, you can use their website for everything
I’ve been shopping at shitty Jewels all my life and I’m moving to an area where I can choose Jewel or Mariano’s. I was super excited to find this out until they announced as part of the merger, they would sell off a bunch of stores most of which are Mariano’s including the one I would have started going to. I Reeeeeeally hope the merger doesn’t go through.
Two major supermarkets do this in the UK now. I fucking hate it, it should be illegal. I also noticed recently a store with digital price labels. Combine the two and we’re marching towards the news in the post at a breakneck speed.
Many supermarkets do adjust their prices based on the average income of the location they’re in, so this isn’t really different in some ways.
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A local grocery store has kinda done something like this? Just not as extreme as needing an app to shop. They literally took out all the coupons from the mail ads and they have you install their app for coupons. Which makes you run through hoops to install and make an account. I tried doing it in store but I gave up because of how annoying it was and all the information they needed. Just to used a god damn coupon… I miss the little red coupon dispensers in stores.
If this were just “it costs more to be rich” I’d be all for it, but more likely it’s just about jacking up prices based on other factors. So it’ll probably hit poor people, too, by charging more for things they want more, forcing them to give up other stuff they want less.
I’m ok with higher income people paying higher taxes as long it is to the benefit of society. The case in this post it is just to line the pockets of extremely rich people.
Agreed. This is not a wealth tax, this is the rich realizing that they’ve squeezed nearly all they can out of the lower classes. They must now pivot to squeezing the middle class harder to continue building their dragonesque hoard.
it costs more to be rich
Sam Vimes would disagree with you there!
Interesting. Progressive private taxation.
All this time I thought we’d eat the rich. Turns out they’ll eventually just eat each other instead.
No, this is the rich trying to rest the middle class.
They will eat us
Will? They have feasted upon us.
Have? Are. Will continue to. Etc.
It’s a bit like agar.io really
Progressive
Oh you sweet summer child…
Progressive taxes are not the same as ‘progressive’ in terms of social politics.
Progressive taxes are how our tax brackets work. The more you make, the more you pay. This is them saying private companies will use progressive taxation as their model for pricing goods.
Yes, I know. You’re a sweet summer child if you think these algorithms will be used to consistently make wealthier people pay more, as opposed to (for example) charging poor people without cars more because they can’t as easily go to a different store.
They will exploit every customer to the maximum extent that they can. Rich customers may have more ability to pay, but they also have more resiliency and options to resist the exploitation. It does not seem likely that the price discrimination would really end up as progressive in the taxation sense as you hope.
“Private taxation” is just price gouging.
Also known as wealth hoarding.
The rich get richer…
If it would mean things getting cheaper for poor people, it wouldn’t even be all that bad of an idea.
Well, except for the privacy issues, obv.
That’s not what this kind of thing is. It’s a way to bleed even more from those who don’t have three option but to shop there.
This way maybe a banana could cost $10
Is that… Is that not what it costs now?
10 ruppees here About 1/80 th of that price
Haha but your salary is also 1/80000
I can pick up a bunch for 1.59€ at Aldi. The catch is that they are not ripe yet, so I have to leave them on the kitchen counter for 3 days before eating them.
Now, if the extra paid were to go to help those less fortunate. To make the community better, etc. This may not be such a bad thing.
And if the “pay more” was based solely on how much money you have, not how much you’re likely to want the thing being bought.
But capitalism has to capitalism and so the extra goes to rich assholes yacht and bunker funds.
I agree to an extent, but watch out for this:
Now, if the extra paid were to go to help those less fortunate. To make the community better, etc. This may not be such a bad thing
That’s what they’ll claim. They’ll say the people with money are subsidizing the poor single mothers with two jobs (but they’ll say it in a way that makes people feel good) so that they can get reasonably priced groceries. But we all know that those poor single mothers will be paying the current margins while everyone else is paying extra that goes directly to profit those at the top.
Agreed fully. Capitalists must capitalize, especially when those being capitalized have no choice.
This seems like it should be illegal.
don’t worry. prices will come down when albertsons and kroger merge. large corps are just more efficient.
They treat their workers better, too. And pay them more. /s
While the sarcasm in your comment is painfully obvious, certain people, like the average fox news host (aka psychopaths), will read it and see the upvotes and think that we are up voting because we agree. We don’t, we are up voting their dark humor.
Also, fuck you fox news. Fuck you very much.I actually do worry about this. Im such a sarcastic person and I can’t keep from doing it on the web but I wonder if every comment is going to birth a new cult. And this comment I want to be clear is 100% not sarcastic, I truly feel this way. nowadays is nuts.
Ok, look… I know it’s not technically a rule, but we’re going to need you to just start putting “/s” at the end of all your comments. Just add it as a signature line so it shows up on everything, just to be safe. You’ll just have to consider it like some kind of magic charm or ward to prevent something like The_Donald from being conjured up.
Ill staple it to my tps reports.
So elegantly written - thank you!
greedy workers hoarding all their income
Security cameras feed goes through an AI model to classify customers into wealth bands based on appearance, and continually updates the e-ink price labels nearest each customer accordingly.
It’s perfect. This is the market segmentation dream. Segment the market without having to spend the resources to create different versions of the product for each segment. Just change the price per segment! 🥰
Nah, they will lobby to no longer have price tags, so that it will just appear at the cash with arbitrary numbers.
The Checkbook Strikes Back
“I was stuck waiting at checkout for another geriatric millennial to ask the price for every. single. item! As if they can’t afford it, despite all evidence to the contrary. Of fucking course they didn’t have Zelle. And then they left half of it at the register, in everyone’s way!”
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
That “to each according to his need” is the important part here. It’s not going to help anyone, it’s going to like pockets
Demonstrating the inherent contradiction of capitalism in practice.
Capitalism is allegedly the only fair way to price things, via the “Price Mechanism”. However, capitalists have simultaneously been creaming their pants at the idea of charging specific people or people in specific situations more, because they can get more profit, in service of Profit Maximization.
I’m sure I’ll get a lecture on how they are not at all mutually exclusive but I don’t care, honestly. It’s either going to price gouge when the customer is perceived to be in more need (low battery pricing for taxi apps) or have a price based on the customer’s ability to pay… at which point why not socialism?
Essentially, the capitalist will support what is best for themselves and make up reasons why it theoretically might benefit consumers (but not really).
When people talk about the benefits of capitalism, what they’re generally really talking about are the benefits of perfect competition.
The capitalists themselves, of course, absolutely hate perfect competition with the burning wrath of a thousand suns.
I think perfect competition is impossible. The incentive is not to compete fairly, it’s to maximize profits and the most effective ways to maximize profits are anticompetitive, exploitative, or both. Anyone arguing for a society built around such a system is either naive or trying to buy more time with false hopes.
Virtually every condition in the ideal scenario is a barrier for profit, and I don’t think any civilization has managed even a single one of those conditions. There will always be actors looking to take advantage of any loopholes or create unregulated markets.
It’s just not a system that is sustainable. The incentives are simply wrong and the society built around those incentives can’t maintain a system of perfect conditions even if one were to exist.
I think perfect competition is impossible.
It is an ideal to be approached asymptotically, and a correct goal for consumer-protection regulation. Consider for example antitrust law, truth-in-advertising laws, product safety standards, etc. and how they directly match up with and promote those conditions.
It’s just not a system that is sustainable. The incentives are simply wrong and the society built around those incentives can’t maintain a system of perfect conditions even if one were to exist.
It’s not a system that is sustainable in a liassez-faire libertarian Hellscape, because of course capitalism left unchecked devolves into cartels. But it is a system that can be maintained with appropriate regulation.
A theory to use as a standard for regulation assuming you are restrained to a capitalist system, maybe.
But it is a system that can be maintained with appropriate regulation.
The nature of Capitalism requires that some have while others have not. Many of those among the capitalist class will use the full force of their power to obstruct and corrupt regulation, find loopholes, and obtain more power. Regulatory capture, pivoting to the bleeding edge of industry where nobody knows how to regulate yet (financial derivatives, crypto, AI), or just leading a coup - they’ll find a way.
The only way is something that resembles socialism, but you can call it “appropriate regulation” if it makes you feel better. Sure, competition has its place… but it doesn’t belong anywhere near basic human needs.
Mind if I call it market socialism?
