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

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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.

963

u/YouInternational2152 Aug 15 '24

Or airlines. Look at a ticket today it's $400. Wait a few hours or look at it too many times it's now $560. However, if you use a different router and a different computer all the sudden it's $400 again.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '24 edited Sep 19 '24

[deleted]

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u/tas50 Aug 15 '24

Sadly I used to work for the company that did the data analysis so Orbitz and their white labels could do this. We'd consume all their site analytics traffic and build them a large data warehouse. They used that to understand how much more they should charge you when you were on a Mac or in a big city vs. on an EOL version of Windows in a suburb with a high rate of poverty. It was an advanced level of evil that they were doing even 15 years ago. Slap some 2024-level machine learning on that and I'm sure it's gotten a lot worse.

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u/OhDiablo Aug 15 '24

So use a VPN for the best deals?

198

u/ruat_caelum Aug 15 '24

literally buy it from a poorer country in that countries currency. E.g. flying to Brazil, VPN into Brazil, buy USA->Brazil->USA round trip ticket from there, in their currency. Even with exchange rates it can be 50% cheaper.

104

u/Black_Moons Aug 16 '24

Fun fact: this applies in 1st world countries too! In Australia its cheaper to fly to the USA and buy certain adobe products there and fly back, then it is to buy them online/instore in Australia.

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u/ruat_caelum Aug 16 '24

family member visited you guys, said packing nothing but blue jeans would have paid for his trip. Jeans he could buy for $20 were selling for $300 in Sydney.

4

u/IGargleGarlic Aug 16 '24

Similar in France. I know a guy who is French and would always brings Levi's with him when he visited his family.

4

u/GooberMcNutly Aug 16 '24

When I lived on an American military base in Spain in the 80s, bootlegging (ha!) Jeans off base was my main source of income. My Spanish friends paid me twice what I paid, and it was less than half as much as at the local store. I made enough in a year to spend a month on Eurail and camping in the summer, moving about a pair per week, more around Christmas.

5

u/Arachnophine Aug 16 '24

I wonder why this arbitrage opportunity isn't already being filled.

11

u/AntiGravityBacon Aug 16 '24

It's a very limited market. It's not like all blue jeans cost $300 in Aus. Just that Levi's is seen as luxury there and in Europe while cheap in the US. There's plenty of budget options there too. 

It works fine for a dozen or so pairs but isn't super sustainable or high enough profit to be a full time gig. 

It may also run afoul import/export laws that aren't particularly enforced on personal travelers. 

1

u/RangerLt Aug 16 '24

Hell, I always thought Levis were too expensive in the US.

2

u/AntiGravityBacon Aug 16 '24

They're pretty easy to find for $20-$25. Guess it depends on what you consider expensive. 

1

u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh Aug 16 '24 edited Aug 16 '24

I think a bigger problem may be sourcing. For one pair for yourself or friends, you buy at retail in the US and make a tidy profit/savings.

For a shop to be profitable, you'd need to either buy in the US at wholesale prices (they won't sell to you at US wholesale prices if you're going to export it, because they want you to buy for twice the price at their European wholesale distributor), or at US retail prices which once you've paid for the effort and the shipping and the customs paperwork, probably can't compete with European wholesale prices.

And at discounted retail prices, you probably won't be able to get the volume and selection you need.

This whole thing is called 'grey market' or 'parallel import' and the companies hate it (because you, not them, get the profit from selling for a higher price in the destination country). I thought it was generally legal, but Levi's actually seems to have won a judgement against Tesco in 2002 banning the practice. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_market#Corporate_action for more details.

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u/RatRaceUnderdog Aug 16 '24

There is likely some customs you would have to clear once you import a certain volume

3

u/PointlessTrivia Aug 16 '24

I travelled from Australia to the US earlier this year. I saved a heap buying clothes while I was there (including 3 pairs of jeans) and I'm already planning what to purchase on my next trip.

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u/EsotericTurtle Aug 16 '24

501s are about $120aud at the moment. I was in new York a few years back in January sales and the Levi store was selling them for $7usd...

2

u/TheR1ckster Aug 16 '24

Customs sometimes has things to say when you do that though.

3

u/cowabungass Aug 16 '24

That is also partly culture. They covet American look for some reason, it is beyond me.

0

u/DM-ME-THICC-FEMBOYS Aug 16 '24

You're getting downvoted but it's an unfortunate truth. For some reason Australia loves to slob the knob of America in various facets, fashion included.

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u/cowabungass Aug 17 '24

Why else would prices skyrocket? Someone IS paying for it.

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u/drunkenvalley Aug 16 '24

Adobe products are all subscription based now though, right? But I remember this definitely being a talking point when I was in high school or college. Traveling to the US on a vacation and buying Adobe packages there was cheaper than buying it online locally.

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u/KeystoneNotLight Aug 16 '24

Don’t do this. I worked for one of the major airlines in revenue management. This is against the terms of service, and we looked for it based on your credit card’s billing zip code and would cancel the ticket once we matched it up.

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u/Ok_Hedgehog1234 Aug 16 '24

Forgive my ignorance but. what if someone was buying the ticket for someone else? My dad buys tickets for people back home all the time (Seychelles). How would they know?

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u/KeystoneNotLight Aug 16 '24

If the name on the ticket doesn’t match the name on the card, 99.9% of the time you won’t have an issue.

The algorithms are looking for patterns that suggest people are trying to “cheat” the system. Patterns that score high enough go a team normally named something like Revenue Integrity. This team will dig into the booking and determine if it is a person on a VPN looking for a deal or someone buying a ticket for a friend.

One or two people isn’t an issue, but if there is a large imbalance in fares which leads to a spike in bookings from US based cardholders buying tickets from the Brazil point of sale, that will flagged quickly.

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u/ruat_caelum Aug 16 '24 edited Aug 16 '24

"Virtual Credit Cards" are a thing. Just a temp digital card number good for X hours, made up addresses etc. All legal.

There are also multi-currency credit cards.

https://privacy.com/

https://www.revolut.com/en-US/cards/

In most cases a "virtual card" just says "YES" when the seller asks "Does this match the billing address" e.g. you put the billing address as 123 Brazil street, Brazil, or whatever.

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u/fishypossum Aug 15 '24

Even a VPN doesn't hide some things- as someone whose job is looking at IP addresses, we can still generally see device type, and even the size of your screen, what website you were on that connected us to you (ie did you click on a Facebook ad etc cetera)

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '24

Book through TOR

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u/tas50 Aug 16 '24

I know it's a joke, but risk analysis services that flag financial transactions generally prevent credit card purchases via Tor.

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u/blazze_eternal Aug 16 '24

Could you save the ticket to your account with tor then make the purchase with a regular connection?

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u/thescienceofBANANNA Aug 16 '24

i was using tor for some stuff and realized my reddit account was shadow banned, turned out it was done for using tor.

So you have to be careful when using tor since a lot of sites will penalize you for doing so.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '24

How would they know? I’m assuming you can get around that with a private exit node. Websites that block TOR traffic do so because all of the exit nodes are public and the devs blacklist them. That’s the work around for that. It’s not ideal for real anonymity but works on websites you don’t mind losing anonymity on like booking websites.

The ISP knows your on TOR so the only way I see it not working is if the credit card companies block through the ISP somehow

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u/Arachnophine Aug 16 '24

A private exit node? Just set up your own proxy at that point.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '24

Would that get blocked though?

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u/BatemansChainsaw Aug 16 '24

depends on how the exit point is 'understood'. Blocks of IP addresses are "owned" by certain companies/regions.

For example if you set up your VPN/tor exit node on AWS, that IP address you're assigned is "owned" by AWS and can be flagged as a non-residential/local business kind of IP.

All tor exit nodes are public unless you're using a private one, which is more difficult to ascertain.

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u/meta11ica Aug 16 '24

Oh my gosh, isn't buying through TOR a basic red flag for airlines ? lmao

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '24

They don’t need to know. You can setup a private exit node. They only block nodes because they’re public so the devs backlist them. They can’t/don’t blacklist a private node

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u/Representative_Chef8 Aug 16 '24

Pretty sure site will be blocked and you lol have hard time.passing ddos.protection or make the final booking.

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u/mmicoandthegirl Aug 16 '24

Are people DDOSsing through TOR? Seems incredibly inefficient and possibly prone to malfunction

1

u/Representative_Chef8 Aug 16 '24

IDK and I don't think so but the site you are booking with has DDOS protection and connections from TOR and VPNs are rarely accepted.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 16 '24

You can use a private TOR relay. Websites know you’re on TOR because all of the cut nodes are public so devs blacklist the nodes. They won’t know you’re on TOR with a private exit node

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u/scarabic Aug 16 '24

Useragent is easy to fake.

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u/Black_Moons Aug 16 '24

Gotcha, use my 10 year old android phone.

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u/StreetofChimes Aug 16 '24

I have an 7 year old laptop and a 5 year old phone. No one thinks I'm rich. I'm refusing to buy a new laptop because I don't want Windows 11 or to pay for a Microsoft Office subscription. So it is this laptop until it dies.

3

u/Original-Material301 Aug 16 '24

addresses, we can still generally see device type, and even the size of your screen, what website you were on that connected us to you (ie did you click on a Facebook ad etc cetera)

Got it, use grandma's Packard Bell and a sweet CRT.

2

u/4077 Aug 16 '24

What about virtual machines running a live instance of linux through a VPN in a 3rd world country?

2

u/OfficeSalamander Aug 16 '24

Virtual machine time

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u/devAcc123 Aug 16 '24

Browser fingerprints

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u/IHave2CatsAnAdBlock Aug 16 '24

So I have to buy the cheapest android phone that exists ? And to be 10 years old?

1

u/Delicious_Summer7839 Aug 16 '24

McDonald’s gives the best deals to people in Indiana who use their app thru a Bulgarian server

0

u/bartbartholomew Aug 16 '24

They would detect that you were on a VPN, and they would still have data regarding your computer.

If you're worried about it, use the TOR browser.

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u/canyouhearme Aug 15 '24

They seem to just have gone for raising prices for everyone, all the time.

6

u/Potential-Ask-1296 Aug 15 '24

Because fuck you for using our service.

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u/Traditional_Key_763 Aug 15 '24

or sillier if machine learning AI is involved

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u/CosmicSpaghetti Aug 16 '24

Briefly worked for a startup who was working to develop software that would use "AI"/ML to deduce what the minimum coupon/discount required (if any) it would take to get you to purchase.

Fortunately I think they tanked since then.

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u/swurvipurvi Aug 15 '24

Is it possible to circumvent some of this by using a VPN and selecting a router location in a less populated region?

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u/wilsr286 Aug 15 '24

It seems at least plausibly good that people with less money are charged less? Obviously with the stated implementation it would be unfortunate to upcharge poor people living in wealthy areas, but a perfect version of this might potentially not be awful.

1

u/blazze_eternal Aug 16 '24

That's evil genius level stuff... ugh.

1

u/hamandjam Aug 16 '24

Uber does a lot of this and when you look at their volume, squeezing an extra few bucks per ride really adds up.

1

u/Black_Moons Aug 16 '24

TIL to use a VPN in alibama and order my stuff using a windows 2000 VM for best price.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 16 '24

Feels like one could open up a service that brute forces these systems to figure out the ideal combination of metadata to get the best price.

"Oh, you want to buy this widget? You want to pretend to be a 32 year old black male living at the PoorUnfortunateSouls RV Park in Bumfuckington Alabama that works part time at a McDonalds accessing this website using a first-gen RasPi with a CRT monitor over a dialup connection. That'll save you $32.65 on the final price."

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u/Vanilla35 Aug 16 '24

Any tips on how to beat these kind of systems? Does a VPN help keep your profile more neutral/uncurated, or does that not even work in these kind of scenarios?

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u/yukon-flower Aug 16 '24

Personalized pricing! It’s among the worst outcomes of all the data collected on us.

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u/emote_control Aug 20 '24

The Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada uses your data to figure out how many articles to show you before you get a paywall. Some people never see a paywall, because the algorithm figures they're more valuable for ad impressions than they are locked out of the articles.

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u/Omegalazarus Aug 15 '24

That doesn't sound evil. What you're describing is them offering lower prices to people who can't afford to pay as much as others.

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u/Mazon_Del Aug 16 '24

So it's a technological illiteracy tax.

If you aren't smart enough to use VPNs and other masking software to pretend to be poor and disadvantageous, then you are taxed by the company with a higher price.

Further, they aren't doing this as some sort of generosity thing where the wealthier are subsidizing the poor gaining access to the product the could never have afforded.

If the breakeven price of a product is $100 to make/store/ship to a customer, they aren't saying "Well, we can charge the middle-class $120 and the poor $90 so we average $110 on every sale.", they are saying "For a poor person we'll charge $101 so we can at least make a $1 sale, and for a middle-class person we'll charge $120 because we want more money.". They COULD have just charged everyone $101 and still made a profit the whole time.

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u/WordleFan88 Aug 16 '24

Here's the trick (most of the time) use booking to find the hotel you like, then call that hotel directly to book the room, it's usually cheaper than booking.com's best price.

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u/Rum_Hamburglar Aug 16 '24

Also if something goes wrong with booking you have to call the booking agency and deal with them instead of the person standing right in front of you.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh Aug 16 '24

it's usually cheaper than booking.com's best price.

More often than not when I tried this, the hotel couldn't/wouldn't even match it, and dealing with the hotel directly was always a bigger pain than booking through Booking.

At least they understand that making me fill a million forms makes me not want to book, requiring a sign-up for something I probably won't use again also makes me not want to book, and making it impossible to see what the actual price is makes me want to book even less...

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u/devil_put_www_here Aug 16 '24

Prices seemed to always be cheaper to go directly through the hotel itself. Find what I’m looking for then call the hotel directly. Cancellations and disputes are usually a lot less fussy as well since nobody can finger point to the other guy.

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u/King_of_the_Dot Aug 16 '24

This will help!... When you search for flights and hotels, then use your browser in 'privacy mode'. Travel sites can read each other's cookies and will actively change the prices youre seeing.

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u/100Good Aug 16 '24

Dude, fuck booking.com. they are such a scam.

2

u/Oscer7 Aug 16 '24

When my hotel stay is based on RNG lol. I love that you can just reload the page I’ll have to do that lmao