Back in the day we used to call this price gouging or price fixing when the cost of an item would increase based on sudden demand, or due to an emergency, etc. That used to be illegal, but I guess it’s okay in fucking Mad Max world now.
Fuck everything about this and everyone who does it, the world is awful enough to try and get by in we don’t need predatory bullshit like this to make already disgustingly wealthy corporations wealthier: Greed is a crime against humanity.
In the article, the owner using it says he only decreases price while you shop, since having increases during shopping would push customers away, and he’s absolutely right it would. So price increases would only happen overnight/closed hours. The owner talks about competing his low prices with competitors so it can be a race to the bottom. But I doubt most companies would use the pricing this way, most likely there will be surge pricing during weekends and after work.
The problem with this is, they buy bananas at $x, then the price goes to $x+5, so they raise theor prices +$6 to compensate, however the stock they bought was still only bought at $x.
People end up paying a lot more when prices jump, when the store paid a lower price a day ago for that exact food. The price drops are also implemented with way less vigor so they drop slow but you can bet they spike instantly as the cost price goes up.
You make a little bit of money? I can see this system being gamed so hard by people with time on their hands. Stores won’t care how hard they get gamed, if there are enough lazy people where they still make more profit.
Doubt it will happen around here until they replace all the price signs with digital ones. As it is right now, every time a price changes, an employee has to manually change that.
Every day I read a new headline than make me feel like stealing is the closest any of us laymen can get to justice against these types of people. I hope one day massive crowds just take a run on whichever stores start to do this.
Just return the shit that went down in prices and rebuy it. Just keep a healthy supply of bugs at the ready. Have an accomplice bug bomb the store if they start getting suspicious of your return frequency, that aught to throw em off.
Could call it a dynamic infestation… the more the prices change the more the bug frequency changes.
So basically, they want to raise the prices when it’s convenient for them and the prices will also conveniently never go under what it is listed for today even if the demand is low
I saw Wendy’s doing this last month. That’s fine honestly they can do whatever I don’t care, a fast food restaurant will always be a want rather than a need. Grocery is almost always a need, that’s not ok
Dynamic pricing is exploitive at it’s base, allowing it for any industry is a mistake. Setting precedent for food is extremely dangerous regardless of the source.
The problem with stuff like that, especially in America where every day more people feel like they have nothing to lose, is that people will literally just take their guns and shoot up crowds/gougers.
It’s a good way to fast-track the destruction of society.
I live in the countryside with fields directly backing onto my house and I still have no way of buying food directly from farmers, the absolute closest you can get is someone with an apple tree leaving apples in a box on their driveway when they have too many to use. Farmers markets are for posh twats.
We have farmers' markets here too, but if the problem with a supermarket is prices being too high then a trip to the farmers' market is the opposite of a solution. Never mind, of course, that a farmers' market would get cleaned out of everything on sale in a matter of minutes if everyone replaced their supermarket shopping with it.
I would like to know why you think that a supermarket that applies dynamic pricing in a physical shop would not also do the same online
My local farmers market is only open seasonally and consists of about 1/3 of their booths selling banking services or squishmallows, 1/3 of the booths selling (delicious, but not very storable) ethnic foods, a bread stand, a honey stand that also sells mail order animals by the quarter (butchered, I think), and 3 booths selling scraggly renditions of whatever they’re currently harvesting.
I wish I lived in the same sorts of community conditions where you live, or had the connections to local food producers that you do, but the reality is that I takes whats I can get.
And what I can get is from mega corps that care more about profits than starving a few people.
Price increases happen overnight, or with everything tracked and digitized, this could lead supermarkets to charge more money right when demand spikes or maybe in the future even target particular shoppers willing to pay more.
They're going to take your frequent shopper card and figure out what your price point for different goods are. Then they're going to take their tracking of your cellphone and figure out when you're approaching your favorite goods, to raise the price. The technology for everything part of this already exists and is being used, it's just a question of who links everything up first.
Right when the inflation thing started I invested heavily in Costco. Figure if suddenly the price of food mattered a lot people will make sure to buy it only from them.
Works out for me, my nearest Costco is closer than my nearest Walmart
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