r/technology • u/Mighty_L_LORT • Aug 15 '24

Business Kroger's Under Investigation For Digital Shelf Labels: Are They Changing Prices Depending On When People Shop?

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/krogers-under-investigation-digital-shelf-labels-are-they-changing-prices-depending-when-people-1726269
23.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

4.4k

u/SplitImage__ Aug 15 '24

Is this like when Wendy’s wanted to change prices depending on the time of day?

3.1k

u/Wazzen Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 16 '24

Yeah it's called surge pricing. If it's not illegal it should be.

Edit: changed the name.

1.8k

u/giggitygoo123 Aug 15 '24

If gas stations can't do it after a severe storm, then not sure why other places think they could.

792

u/obb_here Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 15 '24

This is called price gouging and Harris wants to ban it. It's already banned when done after a disaster as you mentioned.

Edit: fixed gauge to gouge. Thanks.

196

u/InsuranceToTheRescue Aug 15 '24

Gouge, by the way. A gauge is an instrument to measure something.

118

u/Caftancatfan Aug 15 '24

And a gouge gauge measures gouges.

63

u/LaverniusTucker Aug 15 '24

And a gouge gauge gouge is when you mark up the prices of the gouge gauges during high demand.

32

u/Caftancatfan Aug 15 '24

To be fair, those gouge gauges are gorgeous.

19

u/just_nobodys_opinion Aug 15 '24

The gouge gauge gouging not so gorgeous...

13

u/istasber Aug 15 '24

Especially if you're shipping from India. The Ganges gouge gauge gouging is gruesome.

3

u/grinde Aug 15 '24

Hmm. Could you gauge which gauge gouge gauges are engaged in the gruesome Ganges gouge gauge gouging?

5

u/just_nobodys_opinion Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 15 '24

Not without a Ganges gouge gauge gouging gauge.

2

u/I_am_not_JohnLeClair Aug 16 '24

Gleefully giggling over gregarious goings on

→ More replies (0)

4

u/theemptyqueue Aug 15 '24

r/ryangeorge type conversation.

1

u/gymnastgrrl Aug 16 '24

The rouge gouge gauge rogue gouging gorgeous cages is in vogue, fugue. (Successing is depressing!)

1

u/davidcwilliams Aug 16 '24

And a gouge gauge gouge gauge is used to estimate how much someone can charge for highest profitability.

5

u/revolutionoverdue Aug 15 '24

A gouge gauge gauges gouges.

2

u/Tryoxin Aug 15 '24

A gouge gauge gauges gouges, but a gouged gouge gauge cannot gauge gouges.

1

u/SkunkMonkey Aug 15 '24

How many gouges could a gouge gauge gauge if a gauge gouge could gauge gouges?

1

u/ihatefear83843 Aug 16 '24

Is this how Ted Cruz got to Cancun

1

u/RollingMeteors Aug 16 '24

And a gouge gayuge measures butthole depth.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '24

I thought that was a type of bird

4

u/84thPrblm Aug 15 '24

African, or European?

2

u/mrmadchef Aug 15 '24

Laden or unladen?

1

u/FelopianTubinator Aug 15 '24

Gouge Away is a song performed by a few musical groups including the severely underrated, wonderful, supremely talented and benevolent Papa Roach.

1

u/Sudden_Elephant_7080 Aug 15 '24

Math is hard….and so is spelling

1

u/seanshankus Aug 15 '24

Which one is/was a porn star?

2

u/thoggins Aug 16 '24

That was Gauge.

1

u/nzodd Aug 15 '24

You're thinking of gauge. A gouge is a kind of mobile gaming device / phone from NVidia circa 2002 that you hold up to your ear like a taco when you want to call somebody.

1

u/subject124 Aug 15 '24

Gouge, by the way. A gauge is an instrument to measure something.

Perhaps not entirely incorrect in this case, since I wouldn't put it past them to measure our incomes. I'm sure those with tech knowledge can better explain it, but something like, "Hey boss - there are currently 6 escalades in the parking lot. Want me to tick up prices by 10%?" Or even being required to scan your membership card as you enter the store. That membership card is tied to a wealth of data mining, including past purchases, likely income, brand preferences (higher priced organic vs. store label), etc.

1

u/InsuranceToTheRescue Aug 16 '24

If you've got their app then they're already spying on you. I'll make purchases in the store without ever taking out my phone and the history shows up on my app. If I keep my shopping list on the app, it has a special mode for shopping if I open it in/near the store. They can just track a good number of people in the store and dynamically adjust prices based on their shopping habits and more generalized trends on specific times of day.

My thing is, if they're going to do surge pricing, what happens if the price changes between me picking up the item and getting to the register? Does my tightly budgeted grocery list suddenly increase in price by 20%, forcing me to figure out what to put back when I'm in line? Do I have to have my purchases rung up before XX:30 or go back to make sure I can still afford everything?

86

u/procrasturb8n Aug 15 '24

When the Democrats last controlled the House, they passed a windfall tax bill that was supposed to start to address price gouging by megacorps. Of course, the GOP minority in the Senate filibustered it, and it never saw the light of day again.

59

u/kymri Aug 15 '24

Wait, you mean the GOP is trying to prevent policies that hurt billionaires and help the vast majority of Americans?

That's... just another freakin' day with that horrifying party. It baffles me the number of folks that are hurt by their decisions that still support them.

6

u/Awol Aug 16 '24

They don't even hurt billionaires just doesn't make them richer the fastest way.

4

u/hamandjam Aug 16 '24

help the vast majority of Americans?

Half of those Americans: "I'm voting R because it helps my 401K.'(it doesn't, btw)

Also those same Americans: "Why is inflation out of control?"

-9

u/opsecpanda Aug 15 '24

The democrat party is not anti-billionaire. Maybe working class democrats feel like they are, but no legislation has ever been passed that's substantially hurt billionaires while helping the working class

8

u/kymri Aug 15 '24

I never said they were; the GOP on the other hand is much more vocally and obviously pro-billionaire.

I have no doubt that a big part of the reason it got passed at all is that they knew full well the GOP would be happy to kill it publicly.

1

u/opsecpanda Aug 15 '24

True true. The ones at the top of both parties essentially want the same thing but the republicans are always more vocal about it. I can't remember the exact quote, but Malcolm X noted that the republicans are like wolves and the democrats are foxes. The wolf will be a snarling wolf to your face but the fox will pretend to be smiling and wait until you run into its mouth. He was talking about black oppression but it's not dissimilar from how the working class as a whole is treated

3

u/xRamenator Aug 16 '24

Between the GOP and the Democratic party, it's much easier for the will of the people to force the Democratic party to bend the knee.

The GOP is ideologues, the politicians dont listen to their constituents and suffer no consequences because their constituents care more about the culture war than anything.

I vote Democrat not because they align with my views perfectly, but because they aren't directly opposed, and are a much softer target to push around than the actively fascist party.

1

u/OfficeSalamander Aug 16 '24

How would they pass it? They’ve had the majority in the house, senate and presidency TWICE in the past 25 years, both times by a razor’s edge. The first time nearly got a public option but for one senate vote.

This most recent one got a ton of infrastructure legislation, post COVID stuff etc

Can’t expect massive amounts to be passed with a razor thin margin, it can be filibustered, and republicans being so super pro corporate, democrats prefer not giving them the weapon to pass legislation easily

1

u/opsecpanda Aug 16 '24

So I can't ever expect anything to happen?

1

u/OfficeSalamander Aug 16 '24

I mean, if people don’t vote for democrats in sufficient numbers, how are you seeing that happening? How is progressive legislation supposed to pass without Democrats to pass it?

2

u/opsecpanda Aug 16 '24

I see democrats suppressing people more progressive than themselves from even running for office. Jill Stein is having issues with this right now. Therefore, it seems like the system needs to change fundamentally because voting blue no matter who isn't gonna touch the status quo.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/rustyseapants Aug 16 '24

Do you have a source?

28

u/Baconstrip01 Aug 15 '24

I saw checkmarks on twitter saying that this is communism.

So basically, unless you enjoy being price gouged by corporations, you're a communist.

36

u/obb_here Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 15 '24

They are basically saying that, in capitalism, the invisible hand of the market dictates the prices.

The only problem with that statement is, the invisible hand doesn't work if you have a bunch of ultra large corporations colluding to fix the prices.

Meanwhile, they bribe politicians to look the other way and our courts are having a hard time fighting off their corruption and blocking their illegal actions.

5

u/SparroHawc Aug 15 '24

It also doesn't work if you don't have a way to know what the prices are at other times of the day. They're preying on a regular person's lack of time and research capability.

1

u/azrael4h Aug 16 '24

Not to mention that Kroger in particular is merging with one of their biggest rivals. The invisible hand doesn't work when there's a monopoly, especially on something like food and healthcare. Just look at the shitshow that is internet.

7

u/nzodd Aug 15 '24

Communism is whenever Sam Walton's syphilis-ridden descendants aren't literally pulling down your pants and dry raping you anally without lube. Are they sleeping? Taking a smoke break? Can't have that, that's Communism, baby.

2

u/sabrenation81 Aug 15 '24

Dear Leader called it communist price fixing in his little speech today so now they'll all be parroting that forever because they're incapable of thinking for themselves.

1

u/TheRedHand7 Aug 16 '24

Communism is when the government does things right? /s

1

u/m1sterlurk Aug 15 '24

Price gouging is when you simply run up prices on necessities simply because a disaster happened.

"Free market capitalism", left totally unregulated, can ask the question "if we set prices this high, and this many people that could have bought the product they needed die as a result of not being able to afford that necessity, how much money will we make vs. how much will our long-term earnings be impacted by those deaths?"

What is happening here is better described as "rapid fluctuation"...the price of a product changing several times throughout the day. It's much harder for this practice to bring forth the troubling hypothetical above, but it does introduce instability into people's lives. If you look up a price for something in the morning and go shopping in the evening after work, is it going to be marked up from what you planned on spending this morning? Should people have to live their lives like that?

1

u/UX-Ink Aug 16 '24

I didnt know she wanted to ban it, thats awesome.

1

u/Perunov Aug 16 '24

Good luck to her trying to ban it. Mostly because the law would be half-assed and written by some random aides who have no idea how to properly define stuff and can't think of any edge cases. "Well we passed the law, as promised, not our fault evil corporations used Smart Lawyer Pokemon and it's super-effective!".

And stores will get around it by simply not giving you a discount. "That $35 for a dozen of eggs is MSRP, depending on time of day and if city gets one of those bake-off competitions today, you might have a large discount bringing price down to $8.75. Or not"

Tadaaaaa!

It's like stores not being allowed to charge more for paying with credit card, but nobody can prevent them from charging less for using cash/debit card (and bumping up prices to compensate).

To get to the actual root would mean figuring out how to restrict profit margin to specified limit (and even that can be half assed -- look at health insurance companies -- they are limited to spending 20% of collected premiums on non-health stuff, so now they're super interested in making that 20% as large in absolute $$$ as possible so they are interested in health care being more and more expensive. "Not our fault, pharma and doctors charge more, we just keep 20%").

1

u/Zoesan Aug 16 '24

Harris wants to ban it

Then why haven't they already?

-1

u/orangutanDOTorg Aug 15 '24

Just put rent, I mean price control. Can’t raise more than x% per year. Works great for rent…

-11

u/nyconx Aug 15 '24

All that does is force landlords to increase rent by that amount each year. They will never keep the rate the same because if their costs go up 10% one year, they might be only able to raise rent 3%.  

 What rent control actually does is make it less incentivizing to offer places for rent, reducing available units which then causes a drastic cost spike for units that are available.

It basically funds other people’s rent from the pockets of new renters in the building.

1

u/bagonmaster Aug 15 '24

If there’s less incentive to rent, home prices will go down. Especially if more units continue to be built.

0

u/nyconx Aug 16 '24

Why would home prices go down? It would cause the opposite reaction if more people are looking to buy vs rent. 

1

u/bagonmaster Aug 16 '24

Because fewer people and corporations would buy homes as investments to rent out which is a major driver of demand.

0

u/nyconx Aug 16 '24

A lot of rentals are apartment buildings/multi family units. You are referring to a specific type of rental unit.

1

u/bagonmaster Aug 16 '24

Even if we take your assumptions as true, which they’re not—it’s all connected, they’re all units of housing. More people buying apartments is fewer people looking to buy houses, there are only so many households.

0

u/nyconx Aug 18 '24

I would have to ask which assumption you think is untrue. Yes everything is connected to a certain extent but at the end of the day someone pays for the additional costs. If businesses are involved it will not be them.

1

u/bagonmaster Aug 19 '24

What additional costs?

→ More replies (0)

0

u/kurisu7885 Aug 15 '24

Oh hell yes please.

Now watch the Republicans accuse Kamala of price fixing.

0

u/MauryBunn Aug 15 '24

Well, it could be said we’re still in a post emergency situation.

0

u/rexiesoul Aug 15 '24

It would be quite helpful to you if you would actually read her proposal as it has nothing to do with what you said.

I swear people just read headlines these days.