If the prices are negotiable, imma be in there haggling like I’m at a Turkish bazaar!
Imagine the chaos it would cause in these stores if they had to negotiate every item. If one it ten customers walked away leaving a cart full of groceries in the checkout. Fixed prices are the technology that allows these giant stores to exist. This will never work.
Don’t think they’re planning on allowing negotiations, dynamic pricing just means the price can change (automatically) at any moment, but you’ll still have to pay the sticker price. What I wonder is what happens if the price changes in between the moment you picked up the item and when you reach the register, because at least here in Europe advertised prices are final.
What’s gonna happen is longer lines because of customers going “C’mon now, what are you guys trying to pull…the price on this item was 15 cents cheaper on the tag (because the tag price was changed in the 30 minutes between the customer removing the item from the shelf and them going to the checkout)”.
The employees I’m sure will have the authority to change the pride at the register a little bit, but with them scanning thousands of items every hour? “Manager, can I get an override” will be indelibly etched into all of our collective memories very soon.
This cannot be stopped. It’s truly shocking major stores don’t do this already. I’m not applauding this, but the writing has been on the wall for years.
Yeah, I vow, right now, to habitually destroy the display screens for any place doing this. Who’s with me? How long can they squeeze before we fuckin explode? I say it’s already too much. Little LCD screens or whatever they’re gonna use are probably dirt cheap, but if we do it long enough, destroy enough of their property, maybe it won’t be worth it.
I know this is wishful thinking. But this kind of shit cannot be tolerated. There is no way this will be a “race to the bottom” as the asshole in the article said. No fuckin way. It will be a steady climb, uniform, just like everything else under this tyrant capitalism we suffer through.
Oat milk is a great fucking example of this. Oat milk is absurdly expensive for what it is. And it always has been. If anything, the price has gone up as more producers entered the market. The opposite should’ve been happening. Instead, every company artificially keeps their prices high, together. I’m in NYC, so the effect is amplified here, but you can’t find a carton of oat milk for under $5.50. Most anre in the $7 range. Oats and water, thickener, preservatives, sometimes sugar. That’s all oat milk is. But most oat milk companies are selling it as a boutique product, riding the “clean eating” wave that jacked up “organic” food prices, brought about the deceptive labeling, and gouged us all.
It’s long past riot time, people. We aren’t a player in capitalism that has any agency. We are literally the lowest rung of the ladder. The entire population. At the whim of a handful of assholes. Their system runs on us, exploiting us for all it can, and we continue on with it because it has us by the throat. But we can stop working for it. And if we stop working, it stops immediately. We are very powerful, but we just don’t use this nuclear option. But it’s been time to press that button for decades.
Like, customers do not want the price of their Kvikk Lunsj to go up while they’re shopping. So while the supermarket is open, prices shall only go down. Price increases happen overnight
Okay, so how do you deal with having all your customers shop exclusively during the last hour of business because that’s when prices are guaranteed to be at their lowest?
Yeah pretty much you can really see it on many highly processed, high margin, non essential food. Think cookies, chips, frozen quick food ect. There is a huge effort to manipulate the prices and drive you to not only buy that product but also draw you into a store.
Clever for the example to be lowering prices when we know they are going to use this to squeeze us.
Is there a path forward that doesn’t involve a class war?
We live in perpetual class occupation precisely because the owner class has never had a problem assaulting the lower classes, while the lower classes argue about how unseemly and unfair it would be to fight back.
The path forward not involving the peasants actually fighting back for once is just more of the same, the owner class leveraging their capital/power/governmental capture to get more for themselves by finding new and interesting ways to exploit you.
No, there is no way forward with any hope that doesn’t involve class war. Fortunately for the owners, their divisive propaganda is working as intended. We’re more interested in fighting one another over social wedge issues, largely exacerbated by economic inequity btw(more peasant income, for example, would mean fewer abortions without bans as abortion is often, obviously, and understandably an ECONOMIC decision), than our common enemies at the top. Until we stop looking for fellow peasants to blame for our problems and start looking upward at the root cause, there is no hope.
Best way to stop this is something like the FTC stepping in. Honestly, this is mostly likely illegal in the context of a grocery store.
If I walk up to a shelf, grab an item advertised at $1, then when I get to the checkout stand it’s actually $2, you’ve now mislead me on the price with no ability for me to have verified the price.
Now, without getting the law involved, one thing you can do is simply make it too expensive for these stores to switch prices. Take a picture of the price when you grab an item (annoying I know) and if you get to the exit and the price is higher, reject it and have the grocer take it back.
If you don’t want to do this with everything, primarily target refrigerated foods which they HAVE to throw out if you give it back to them (And they have to take it back).
In Australia, if you see an item had scanned for more than the price advertised on the shelf, you get it free. I’ve seen it in action a few times in my life. Last one was a savvy teenager who saw his bottle of coke was higher and he called it. He got it free.
When I worked at a grocery store (a bit over a year ago) we had a sign posted near the registers, though in a place it was easy to not notice, stating something similar, though it might have been a state law (MA) rather than anything federal.
I’ve seen grocery stores with digital price thingies on the shelf in front of the items before. They’ll probably switch to that it it ever became a legal issue. Some people, not me, would suggest, though I would never, that breaking those and shoplifting would be good and ethical responses to such activity. In theory. I’d never suggest that, though. All that businesses do is good, and a hundred quantbrillion lifted out of poverty and blah blah blah flag waving gif
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