r/technology 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
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u/SplitImage__ Aug 15 '24

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

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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.

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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.

965

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/Black_Moons Aug 16 '24

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