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Walmart's use of digital price tags signal the future of retail shopping, but consumers are worried (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 78 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    That’s exactly what this is. All stores will eventually do this and prices will fluctuate throughout the day.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’ll be exciting to see prices temporarily jump during the few hours the majority of working class folk have to do their shopping.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    As long as it's advertised openly, I don't see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It's a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.

    Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn't particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You're thinking logically and with the desire for good service. I assure you they are not.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot.

    You can’t just logic this kind of thing out mathematically because during those 44 hours people have lives to live and obligations to fulfill. Families to manage, food to prepare, appointments to attend, plus they need to sleep. Busy shopping hours are busy for a reason. Nobody wants to be stuck in a busy shopping center. They just do because that’s the time they have to do it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Since you are arguing from a perspective of what benefits society, I can only assume you must be a socialist. One of the foundational principals of capitalism is that capitalists have every moral and legal right to extract as much value from society as they can and the market will regulate itself. As long as we have a capitalist system this will always be the default position of the general public and our politicians.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And personalized pricing, based on your profile and what they think they can get you to pay.

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  • [+] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Take a photo of it, I work with paper but we change our tags frequently. We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout. I've also had times where a customer came back to check a shelf tag after I just updated it. I honored the previous price those times as I was still holding the tickets but its not a guarantee even in paper stores.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    We often have prices changed when a customer reaches checkout.

    I know this isn't your fault or anything but damn, that seems lightly customer hostile at best, and deeply unethical at worst. It sounds like it should be illegal.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    That sounds very illegal, yeah. You can't advertise a price and then charge something different. It doesn't matter that the person didn't notice it. At that point you might not have price tags at all (which is also illegal, just FYI).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I can't speak internationally or legally but from what I know from friends in similar jobs daily prices changes aren't uncommon. The reason and when it happens often is normally the start of the day when there is a new batch of tickets. They don't go up instantly and multiple 100s of tickets normally take a couple hours to get placed depending on how many/busy staff are.

    Main thing is e-ink's don't really make this significantly better or worse. I personally think they are neat for the end worker. The problem is that this is allowed or not enforced well.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It's clearly not an experience that people flock to.

    OTOH, on the rare occasion I've visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.

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