Massachusetts has had fair pricing laws for grocery stores for years that I suspect already de-facto ban "dynamic pricing". It requires grocery stores to ring up the item at the lowest marked or advertised price, or the item is free. It also requires all items to be marked (or have scanners available to show the price), so they can't get around it by just not showing prices.
amazingamazing 9 hours ago [-]
Why grocery stores only? It’s also unclear how this will change anything - don’t the grocery stores in richer areas already charge more? I’ve noticed Whole Foods prices are not the same across all stores even in the same state.
muzani 6 minutes ago [-]
For impact most likely. Dynamic pricing is core to the budget airline industry and such a law would hurt them more, especially with the thin margins. It happens with games too, but the price of games doesn't affect how someone eats.
clintonb 9 hours ago [-]
You're thinking of pricing zones—shoppers in Zone A pay a different price than those in Zone B. This makes sense, for example, if shipping costs are higher in Zone B.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
> This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
bko 25 minutes ago [-]
I think McDonalds dynamic pricing is great. Every time I checkout the app there is some crazy deal. Sure its not always something I want but I'm not necessarily competing w/ the other items on the menu. If there's no deal on something I want, I check BK or similar chains.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
How would that work? The barcode on the item doesn't get rewritten, the checkout counter can't distinguish who picked up which exact item. Even if they did assign unique barcodes to each item, what happens if you take the item off the shelf, and put it in someone else's cart? They'd be charged the wrong price for the item.
rootlocus 4 hours ago [-]
The store could make it mandatory to swipe your fidelity care before calculating your prices. They already do something similar with specialized promotions.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
If we're including promotions or membership discounts, then coupons fit this definition of price discrimination. And those have existed since the 90s at least.
Dylan16807 49 minutes ago [-]
The problems show up when different people don't have access to the same coupons published by the store. Most coupons are fine.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
clintonb 3 hours ago [-]
Your plan fails in a few ways.
Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy.
This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to implement price discrimination. Basic ESLs cost $3 to $12, depending on size and use very little energy. Adding a camera means more energy, so a bigger battery and more cost.
Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
I think viewing it at as a discount is framing it wrong. It’s more a fee for not using the app, and if you use the app you’ll get charged the highest price McDonald’s has decided you will pay.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
mschuster91 3 hours ago [-]
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
fzeroracer 16 minutes ago [-]
> Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
part of the reason I don't go there anymore. I noticed recently taco bell in my area no longer asks about their app, just takes my order.
DocTomoe 17 minutes ago [-]
Just for clarification: Does this affect intraday price changes, and how much if this is AI vs. 'standard database operations'?
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
irishcoffee 6 minutes ago [-]
It’s interesting, no matter what the sign says, the cost is determined at the checkout. I think you missed the point.
This is about profiling people buying through apps.
I guess it’s neat someone is trying to do something about grocery prices, this won’t move the needle. Still nice to have in the books.
Now if only the governer could figure out how to get the Key bridge built instead of firing the company and starting over… that would be cool.
“Yeah it’ll be built by 2028!” At this point I doubt it’ll be finished in my lifetime.
It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I expect the outcome of this to be prices raised for everyone and then loyalty discounts per group.
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
> It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I don't think it should be allowed. It's predatory. It allows a company like Uber and Lyft to see things like "Oh, you are going to a hospital, then I'm going to apply a 10% surcharge because you are probably desperate".
It also works against the drivers. Uber/Lyft see things like "This person is logged on for 8 hours, they are desperate, so let's give them lower rates and worse routes."
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
Why shouldn’t a company be allowed to price the product differently? For an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out are different situations.
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
9dev 5 hours ago [-]
That's one thing, but charging two people for the same route differently is what the parent comment was getting at, and I agree with them.
afc 4 hours ago [-]
You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not. alex43578 was shifting the goalposts from the point cogman10 was making; I acknowledged what he said, but it was besides the point. An airline charging differently depending on the time ahead of flight is sensible. An airline charging differently depending on the buyer's home address is discrimination.
alex43578 3 hours ago [-]
You said "charging two people for the same route differently" is bad: airlines do that constantly and that's why there's dozens of fare changes, fare buckets, sales, codeshares, etc.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
9dev 1 hours ago [-]
I suppose you are misunderstanding me on purpose, but let me try again in very clear terms anyway: Offering the same service or product (a specific flight if you will, a chunk of butter of the same brand in the same store at the same time) to two independent customers at different prices based on prior knowledge about them unrelated to the specific good or service is fundamentally unjust.
alex43578 2 minutes ago [-]
Why is it unjust? It’s absolutely the store or individual’s choice to charge what they want to who they want, assuming that they aren’t discriminating against a protected class.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
They meant something more specific by "route".
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
NiloCK 7 hours ago [-]
This is possible in retail, or will soon be.
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
clintonb 3 hours ago [-]
The electronic shel labels use e-ink. Their refresh time is around 30 seconds. What happens if two shoppers are looking at the same product?
1 hours ago [-]
Paradigma11 3 hours ago [-]
Since you get a location and time stamped receipt these shenanigans would be completely trivial to detect.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to talk about without sounding conspiratorial because it literally is an unfounded conspiracy. The impracticalities of this scheme are immediately obvious and no evidence of it ever actually being implemented in physical retail exists.
chis 7 hours ago [-]
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
wolftune 5 hours ago [-]
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
motbus3 3 hours ago [-]
They charge more for everyone there. Now they are able to charge more for you
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
Which supermarkets have you seen doing this? This conspiracy theory about epaper tags changing their price on you falls flat when you think about it for even a moment. The tags do not update fast enough to do that, couldn’t handle multiple people in the same area, and would be impractical to link back to the purchase time, resulting in people noticing the price scanned didn’t match what they saw on the ticket.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
dlcarrier 5 hours ago [-]
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
alex43578 5 hours ago [-]
It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
0x3f 3 hours ago [-]
Rent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!
emsign 4 hours ago [-]
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
0x3f 3 hours ago [-]
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.
bit1993 3 hours ago [-]
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines
the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
bko 14 minutes ago [-]
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
cowanon77 3 hours ago [-]
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
bko 12 minutes ago [-]
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
Gibbon1 2 hours ago [-]
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
bit1993 2 hours ago [-]
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
Dylan16807 38 minutes ago [-]
> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services
Ok.
Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
intended 2 hours ago [-]
Slogans and bromides are good starting points but not solutions.
The government IS preventing coordinated price setting by closing the loophole of third party data brokers.
josefrichter 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, isn't this prohibited already? Some of it may be a gray zone, but a good portion of it is already downright illegal in many countries, and the rest is extremely unethical.
anArbitraryOne 2 hours ago [-]
What about just setting the stores in high income areas to have higher prices?
geuis 9 hours ago [-]
Doesn't this then open a market for "vpn style" apps that make everyone look broke? Get the lowest prices (ie market/baseline) on every interaction from food delivery to airplane tickets?
Uehreka 9 hours ago [-]
That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.
kdheiwns 8 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't really turning them off as much as it is people having no choice. There aren't too many supermarket chains. If one chain does this, rather than other chains undercutting them on price, they're going to do the same to maximize their profits. Most people only have one or two stores near their home. Some maybe have three. That doesn't leave a lot of options. And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks. Most people will have no choice but to give in, then the practice is implemented everywhere and the price treadmill accelerates.
AussieWog93 7 hours ago [-]
>And if you or your family is hungry, you won't drive around for hours, burning gas, until you find a shop that saves you a few bucks.
Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
Like I personally don't know every single price at every single shop before I go, but I do know for example that Henry's Mercato or the Big Watermelon will have some kind of cheap bulk fruit, Aldi has cheaper staples, Springvale has the best fish etc. etc.
There are plenty of other places I checked out once or twice and then wrote off as a bad deal.
protimewaster 4 hours ago [-]
> Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
xp84 8 hours ago [-]
Bingo. Exactly. In every one of these oligopolies, the most customer-hostile behaviors spread quickly and completely, and any customer-friendly ideas anyone sneaks in fizzle out quickly.
Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way.
This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.
xethos 8 hours ago [-]
You've actually got that backwards - being wealthy makes your time and effort worth more (to you) than the half-hour you'd spend price-comparing every item in the cart for each price difference (each between $0.03 and $2.00), while being poor makes price comparisons much more worth it
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
asdfasgasdgasdg 7 hours ago [-]
Right, which would imply that a VPN that makes you look broke would help get you better prices.
emsign 4 hours ago [-]
Haha, no no no. I don't trust this to be true. Everyone will pay more or else the investment into this technology doen't break even.
positr0n 7 hours ago [-]
Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
SilverElfin 8 hours ago [-]
They’ll require ID verification for everything. Like they are normalizing with age verification for social media
amazingamazing 9 hours ago [-]
How’s that gonna work when they know your address?
odie5533 5 hours ago [-]
This doesn't look like a cure for cancer like I was promised.
heisenbit 2 hours ago [-]
Yesterday in Lidl I was a bit shocked seeing the coupons offered by their app. They did a really good job with their mixture of stuff I had bought or might buy.
Iulioh 2 hours ago [-]
Note for people who don't know:
They profile you and offer discounts based on your past purchases
HeartStrings 6 hours ago [-]
Why share locked articles? Why would you do such a thing?
0x3f 3 hours ago [-]
I think people are often just logged in for years and forget they're reading a paid resource.
thunderstruck 7 hours ago [-]
I'd like to see fair pricing for airlines tickets too.
bdangubic 7 hours ago [-]
use a VPN, like Bulgaria is usually good. everything is on sale if you are Bulgarian (most of the time).
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
Nykon 7 hours ago [-]
I have residence in Bulgaria and I do not necessarily agree with that statement. Glad it works for you though
protimewaster 4 hours ago [-]
I assume this doesn't work with every airline / in every case? E.g., if I am booking with a US-based airline like United or American, to fly between two US cities, do they really bother to offer cheaper tickets based on your international location?
MithrilTuxedo 8 hours ago [-]
Isn't the Free Market already a form of AI that does exactly that? How can you ban tools for measuring the value of things?
njovin 8 hours ago [-]
The ban is specifically on adjusting prices _per-consumer_ based on data known/collected/stolen/assumed about the consumer.
oceanplexian 7 hours ago [-]
Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
tehjoker 6 hours ago [-]
You think this is like 1800s levels of economic development?
brendoelfrendo 7 hours ago [-]
> Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
testing22321 7 hours ago [-]
Which is wild, because things like car dealerships, airline tickets and many more do it already.
danielmarkbruce 7 hours ago [-]
Not to mention seniors discounts, active military, and all kinds of things.
antiframe 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, but those are per category not per consumer, which is a meaningful difference here and one you can't just ignore. Imagine a price label with a small camera that sends your facial image to a classifier of moods. Hungry? Pay 15% more. As you remove the item from the shelf, the tag reads the GUID from the item and records the price in the stores DB. Then, when you checkout, you pay that price. Someone else comes in get one price, balks, walks away. Comes back and ponders a while. They only get 5% above the base. Someone runs up and grabs and item without really looking at the tag, they pay 50% more. Now imagine that it gets it wrong half the time.
0x3f 3 hours ago [-]
Just seems like a difference of degree. You have n price tiers in both situations. Traditionally, the complexity of n_prices = n_customers (or even n_prices = n_customer_contexts) was too painful to be worth it. But they were always approximating this up until now. 'Categories' are just wider buckets over individualized prices.
SilverElfin 10 hours ago [-]
Why just grocery stores? Why not ban selling or purchasing our information to and from data brokers. Like for all uses.
janalsncm 8 hours ago [-]
Because this kind of price discrimination doesn’t require selling or purchasing data from data brokers. If you buy enough from Instacart, they can and do build it all in-house.
9 hours ago [-]
7 hours ago [-]
vjvjvjvjghv 9 hours ago [-]
The end goal must be to emulate US healthcare where nobody knows what things cost and you find out only months or years after buying.
motbus3 3 hours ago [-]
And also to eliminate all competition who doesn't have enough money to compete
emsign 4 hours ago [-]
No, surveillance pricing is used to get the maximum out of the customer, not the opposite. This needs to be illegal. If anything surveillance pricing will make the retail business MORE like the health care system, because the latter already employs these tactics: the unhealthier you are, the more you pay. Same thing as surveillance pricing.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
socalgal2 3 hours ago [-]
> the unhealthier you are, the more you pay.
I'd re-write that as "the more you consume the more you pay". Seems normal.
adrian_b 2 hours ago [-]
In most industries, especially in electronics and computers, the more you consume, the less you pay.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
RandomLensman 2 hours ago [-]
Should there be any consumer surplus?
xyzal 2 hours ago [-]
Regarding US healthcare costs, I cannot understand why people are not in the streets with pitchforks. Most of Europe has this problem solved.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
jackdoe 2 hours ago [-]
> Most of Europe has this problem solved.
With paracetamol :)
(Dutch people know what I am talking about)
Leynos 1 hours ago [-]
For those of us who aren't Dutch, please enlighten
thrance 2 hours ago [-]
> What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation?
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
skippyboxedhero 2 hours ago [-]
the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
RandomLensman 2 hours ago [-]
The US also pays relatvely more, not just absolute. Where could I see the US system delivering then? Not sure the data is so clear cut there.
thrance 2 hours ago [-]
> the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
notahacker 1 hours ago [-]
It's "bigger" in the sense it spends more money per capita. Something very American exceptionalist about the OP suggesting that this is somehow more relevant than it covering fewer people and treatments.
joe_mamba 2 hours ago [-]
> life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
joe_mamba 2 hours ago [-]
>the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country.
Probably because Europeans commenting don't know how big Medicare and Medicaid are.
BrenBarn 4 hours ago [-]
> Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
emsign 4 hours ago [-]
Good! Surveillance pricing needs to be regulated, it distorts supply and demand massively because one party (pricing service providers, big chain stores) has a MASSIVE information advantage other the others (end customers and small shop owners). It's going to finalize the transition from a free market to a oligopoly in the retail sector. It's basically socialism for a few powerful corporations.
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
This seems sort of meaningless since supply/demand is the ultimate ai. Does this effectively mandate price controls? If so thank fucking GOD
fuckinpuppers 9 hours ago [-]
That shit is evil
dandanua 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, and it's already in many places where possible, e.g. taxi, airlines, online stores and services, insurance, health, etc.
Supply curves are literally predicated on one price for a market.
pdonis 8 hours ago [-]
If by this you mean that standard supply-demand economics can't model price discrimination, which is what's going on here, that's not correct. See, for example, Chapter 10 of David Friedman's Price Theory, where he models price discrimination using supply and demand curves just fine. In terms of this kind of analysis, price discrimination is a way for sellers to try to transfer as much as possible of what would otherwise be consumer surplus, to themselves.
WalterBright 7 hours ago [-]
And the buyer tries to pay as little as possible. Negotiating is a skill well worth learning (lots of books on it).
9dev 5 hours ago [-]
This discussion is perverse. Negotiations require leverage, which the average grocery buyer in the USA does not have. As a society we don't benefit from min-maxing absolutely every opportunity.
WalterBright 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
RandomLensman 1 hours ago [-]
Government stores are fine then?
WalterBright 8 hours ago [-]
You decide if a price is worth it to you. The LSD is just an aggregation of that.
lysace 9 hours ago [-]
Not sure that is applicable here.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
WalterBright 7 hours ago [-]
That has always happened. If you go to a flea market, do you think the seller isn't going to bump up the price if you look prosperous or desperate? Do you think the roof replacement company isn't going to make a bid based on how wealthy or poor your neighborhood looks? Or you need a new water heater? Do you think grocery stores in wealthy neighborhoods charge more?
We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no".
BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?
antiframe 6 hours ago [-]
At the flea market you can haggle. Are you saying we should all have to haggle with the harried checkout person over the price of milk ever time we shop? Or everything is self checkout and you don't haggle but then choose whether you accept the price or not?
As with many things in technology, it's not about the raw concept, it's about the automation of it and inability to appeal to a human. Haggling face to face is human. Having a bot decide what you are paying (take it or leave it) is asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo.
WalterBright 5 hours ago [-]
I've never encountered or heard of a grocery store that didn't mark the prices on the shelves.
> asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo
You have the power to say "no". The only transactions you are forced into are the ones dealing with the government or the mob.
> inability to appeal to a human
I was stonewalled by a gigantic corporation the other day over a substantial sum of money. I googled the name and address of the CEO, and sent him a hand written polite letter. My issue was promptly resolved.
I know the CEO didn't read the letter. But he has staff that does, and hand writing a letter will get their attention, as well as reminding them that I was a loyal customer.
Ar-Curunir 9 hours ago [-]
Better that you stick to promoting D instead of defending price gouging.
WalterBright 8 hours ago [-]
The inevitable result of government setting prices is some combination of:
1. shortages
2. gluts
3. black markets
It doesn't matter what your or my opinion on it is, any more than having an opinion on F=ma. The Law of Supply and Demand is always in play.
There are thousands of years of history on this.
pdonis 8 hours ago [-]
This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination. It's forbidding sellers from transferring consumer surplus to themselves by charging a higher price to customers that would be willing to pay a higher price for the same item. But the item is still available to buyers that wouldn't want to pay the higher price--at the lower price. The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them. Whether they will try to find other ways of increasing their profit over what they get when every customer pays the price that's equal to their marginal cost, is a different question.
WalterBright 7 hours ago [-]
> This isn't government setting prices. It's just government outlawing a certain form of price discrimination.
I.e. the government is regulating prices, yet another attempt going on for 4,000 years of trying and failing to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
> The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them.
Allow me to explain how prices are set:
Consider an appliance store. They want to sell refrigerators. What do they do? They have 3 refrigerator lines - the stripper, the midline, and the lux. The purpose of the stripper is that is what they advertise, to bring customers into the store. The purpose of the midrange is to upsell those who come for the stripper, as they think the extra features are worth it. The lux is sold to the wealthy customers who just want to buy the best. (Not having a lux is means the retailer is throwing easy money away.)
The moneymaker is the midrange.
You'll see the same thing in the grocery store. The store advertises the price of milk, which is likely at below cost (called a "loss leader"). People come to buy the milk, which is always on the back wall of the store. The customer has to pass by all kinds of things to get to the milk, and they'll buy it. The most overpriced stuff will be next to the checkout line.
Cheeses come in cheap, midrange, and lux, too.
There's been an extensive amount of research on exactly how to set up the store to maximize profits, which is necessary as grocery stores have razor thin margins.
BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
tzs 6 hours ago [-]
> BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
Many stores are rolling out electronic price tags on the shelves, which can be rapidly updated wirelessly [1]. They could probably do the price adjustment there. I'd assume they wouldn't want to make it too blatant, which would be a challenge.
If it adjusted the prices as someone approaches, I suspect customers would soon notice it.
I'm not going to order food at a restaurant if the menu has no prices on it, even if I'm a zillionaire.
guelo 5 hours ago [-]
Somehow we did just fine without real-time per-customer price discrimination.
WalterBright 5 hours ago [-]
As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's been going on since the first fruit stand thousands of years ago.
morkalork 8 hours ago [-]
Isn't this level of price discrimination in a round about way just a worse form of communism? If the algo decides you can pay X% of your worth for an item, and X% of my worth for the same item even though the absolute dollar amounts are different, isn't that strange?
Rendered at 11:10:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The bill in question is about per-shopper pricing (e.g, you and I pay different prices in the same store). This is something Lyft and Uber do, but it's not really possible in retail.
It is possible for retail. For example, you can simply not display the price. You can display a price range. You can use EInk displays which auto-update based on who's approaching the item.
And of course it's infinitely possible in an online store.
One example of how this is being employed is McDonalds trying to push everyone to use the app. They'll give lower prices in app while raising prices on the menu giving a "not using app" tax. That enables them to have flexible per user prices within the app. A store could do the same thing.
They haven't had the ability to do the significantly bad kinds of targeting until recently. This is a new problem even if it's similar to old practices at the surface level.
Refreshing the content on an electronic shelf label (ESL) takes about 30 seconds, and multiple people can view a product simultaneously. Unless the store is giving everyone AR glasses, people will notice the price discrepancy.
This assumes you have sufficient data to actually recognize a shopper such as facial ID or some form of iBeacon for every single product for which you wish to implement price discrimination. Basic ESLs cost $3 to $12, depending on size and use very little energy. Adding a camera means more energy, so a bigger battery and more cost.
Using in-app discounts is the most likely way to implement this, which I am okay with. Shoppers are willingly trading their data privacy for a discount.
Should this be legal is a question you could argue both ways, but in my opinion society will be worse off with per customer pricing.
I'm not OK with this. Simple reason, it leaves the wide masses with no other option than to sell their data to survive.
Your mistake is assuming it's a discount, when it's not. For example, Safeway near me charges exorbitant prices for goods which are anywhere from 30-50% lower in the app. What they're doing is the same as your average dark pattern, you're only getting the real price using the app otherwise they charge a no-app fee. And even then you can't tell what the real price is supposed to be, because the app will tailor discounts to your shopping behavior.
Shoppers can and have noticed the price discrepancy [1] which is why this legislation is happening in the first place. If the price isn't the price then the whole basis of capitalism and consumer choice falls apart because there's no way to make a proper determination if Store A is cheaper than Store B.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-...
I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'Oh, we're going to have a heatwave between 14:00 and 19:00, let's make popsicles 9 cent more expensive for everyone' or 'hm, that particular brand of soda sells extremely good today, let's hike the price'/'this noodle soup gets new stock later today, let's lower the price to clear out the shelf'
Because with electronic signage, that is very possible.
This is about profiling people buying through apps.
I guess it’s neat someone is trying to do something about grocery prices, this won’t move the needle. Still nice to have in the books.
Now if only the governer could figure out how to get the Key bridge built instead of firing the company and starting over… that would be cool.
“Yeah it’ll be built by 2028!” At this point I doubt it’ll be finished in my lifetime.
It’s unclear to me why transportation demand pricing is allowed but not delivery.
I expect the outcome of this to be prices raised for everyone and then loyalty discounts per group.
I don't think it should be allowed. It's predatory. It allows a company like Uber and Lyft to see things like "Oh, you are going to a hospital, then I'm going to apply a 10% surcharge because you are probably desperate".
It also works against the drivers. Uber/Lyft see things like "This person is logged on for 8 hours, they are desperate, so let's give them lower rates and worse routes."
For Uber/Lyft, booking a ride into the middle of nowhere carries a cost for the driver that isn’t present when booking a ride to the airport.
A flat fee per mile doesn’t make sense. A flat fee per seat doesn’t make sense. Grocery stores already price segment via coupons, sales, and loyalty programs - this is just an extension of that.
Regardless, the bigger point is that businesses already have a ton of levers to move for pricing: sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into this protected class; particularly for any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address? There's a clear relevancy of the address to the cost of a service based around that location.
In your example, why aren’t all prices then fixed between different stores to ensure justice? Whole Foods shouldn’t be allowed to charge more than Discount Food Bin for the same can of beans, and WF in Oakland shouldn’t charge less than WF in Marin.
> sales, loyalty programs, and regular price adjustments. None of those are considered discrimination. Why does the buyer's home address fall into
Because everything you listed applies to everyone equally! Assuming a normal loyalty program anyone can join.
> any service that involves transport, delivery, etc to that address
Shopping at a grocery store doesn't involve that. But sure most forms of charging for transport based on destination are fine. That's different from charging two people differently to go the same place at the same time. "Home address" is just an easy piece of personal info to mention.
(An exception to that most would be like the hospital example, charging more for that specific location inside the general area because the buyer seems desperate.)
Canada's major grocery chain has migrated entirely to LCD price tagging that can receive OTA updates. There are now no paper price labels in the store.
The same chains have extensive camera coverage on the entrance / exits of the store.
So pricing can be an optimization function as fine grained as persons currently in the store.
Cameras on the aisles as well can enforce that individual tags update while nobody is within 15 feet, etc.
It's hard to even talk or think about without without sounding (and becoming!) conspiratorial. Add a little data from our trusted partners and they can jack specific prices according to urgency - eg, floral bouquets when you're en route to a dance recital.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
Per customer pricing is only possible for online shopping.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
Ok.
Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
The government IS preventing coordinated price setting by closing the loophole of third party data brokers.
Sure, but if you felt you didn't get a good deal you're not going to go back.
Like I personally don't know every single price at every single shop before I go, but I do know for example that Henry's Mercato or the Big Watermelon will have some kind of cheap bulk fruit, Aldi has cheaper staples, Springvale has the best fish etc. etc.
There are plenty of other places I checked out once or twice and then wrote off as a bad deal.
If you feel that way about all of them, you're not just going to starve to death, though. If you've got two options and they're both bad, you probably just go to one of them anyway.
Great example: 15 years ago, assuming you were out of contract, cancelling a postpaid cell phone line worked very differently. Important to know: it was and still is “billed in advance,” meaning you pay around say, January 4, for your service from Jan 4 through Feb 3rd. So if you cancelled your service around Jan 19th, you’d be owed a refund of a half month’s service. 15 years ago, you’d receive a check or a credit to your method of payment - since you didn’t get the service you paid for, that seemed very obviously correct. Sometime at least 10 years ago, one of the cell phone carriers decided to try just saying that you never got a refund, and that if you didn’t want to be ripped off, then you should just cancel on the one day of the month where you had finished using the service you paid for (and hope you didn’t do it too late and get billed for another month). Initially it was just that one carrier who did this, but quickly this became the norm across the whole industry, and now all three postpaid carriers work exactly that way.
This is of course the same story with more well-publicized enshittification, like Basic Economy plane tickets, data caps on your broadband service, etc. etc.
Being more financially stable means you pay higher prices, in this scenario
Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.
They profile you and offer discounts based on your past purchases
you may have to text back Yes your credit card company when you get a fraud alert text - that’s about the only inconvenience. just bought US-EU return ticket for June - 22% lower than lowest price I’ve seen “from US” in the last month
What? To the best of my knowledge, not a single grocery store chain in my area is owned by someone local to the community. The two biggest chains (that aren't Walmart) are owned by Kroger and by an international retail conglomerate. Both are publicly traded, so there's no single owner to give a shit about the local community.
It's a fundamental shift from:
"I sell this product for the cheapest price possible and I make everything possible in my business to be cost effective and buy from more cost effective businesses."
TO
"I don't care about cost-effectiveness. I just try to find out how to get the most money out of my customers."
I'd re-write that as "the more you consume the more you pay". Seems normal.
Companies like Google or Amazon pay for a server computer only a small fraction of the price I would have to pay to buy it.
Similarly for any electronics or computing device or component. The same is true for any food ingredient. I can buy some spice by the kilogram at a price an order of magnitude lower than when I buy 10 grams of it.
If the same were applied in healthcare, someone with a chronic disease should pay much less for the same drug, in comparison with someone with an acute disease.
What is the root cause w.r.t. the current situation? Are there any obvious ways out? Do any US politicians have any plans for a change? Are there any discussed proposals how to reform?
With paracetamol :)
(Dutch people know what I am talking about)
The current US is built to accomodate the top 0.1%. Their profiteering is more important than the good health of the population.
> Are there any obvious ways out?
Not really. Get money out of politics? Aggressively tax the wealthy and nationalize the entire health apparatus? Easier said than done.
> Do any US politicians have any plans for a change?
The only ones serious about it are on the progressive left, fought harshly by both Republicans and Establishment Democrats, under the guise of their respective patrons.
it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).
it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).
In which metric(s)? Afaik, life expectancy is lower in the US than in most of western Europe. And Americans are known to pay much more than Europeans on healthcare, on average.
Could be more tied to poor diet and lifestyle, and not the healthcare system itself.
Like if you sit on the chair all day on your remote job, then move to the couch for after-work Netflix and PS5, while you drink soda and eat processed food, then the only time you leave your house is you drive your Tesla/F-150 to Walmart and McDonald's, there's no magic healthcare system in the world that can undo decades of self inflicted damage.
Meanwhile people in some impoverished balkan town could end up living longer because they spend their entire lives moving outdoor all day in fresh air and only eat organic what they grow on their plot of land, even if their hospitals and healthcare systems are significantly worse than what americans have.
There's way more variables to life expectancy than just the healthcare system.
Probably because Europeans commenting don't know how big Medicare and Medicaid are.
Another limp-wristed penalty. Why not something like "$1,000 per dollar that you received as payment for prices in violation"? Customer buys a $5 can of beans that was AI-priced, you owe $5,000. They buy another can, you owe another $5,000. You have it set for the whole store, wham, you now owe 1,000 times your gross revenue for that day. Better damn well not do it.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
We live in a market economy. If you don't like the price, us apes have learned to say "no".
BTW, if prices are set by the wealth of the customer, then the poor ought to be getting a better deal. Isn't that a good thing?
As with many things in technology, it's not about the raw concept, it's about the automation of it and inability to appeal to a human. Haggling face to face is human. Having a bot decide what you are paying (take it or leave it) is asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo.
> asymmetric with the benefit going to the corpo
You have the power to say "no". The only transactions you are forced into are the ones dealing with the government or the mob.
> inability to appeal to a human
I was stonewalled by a gigantic corporation the other day over a substantial sum of money. I googled the name and address of the CEO, and sent him a hand written polite letter. My issue was promptly resolved.
I know the CEO didn't read the letter. But he has staff that does, and hand writing a letter will get their attention, as well as reminding them that I was a loyal customer.
1. shortages
2. gluts
3. black markets
It doesn't matter what your or my opinion on it is, any more than having an opinion on F=ma. The Law of Supply and Demand is always in play.
There are thousands of years of history on this.
I.e. the government is regulating prices, yet another attempt going on for 4,000 years of trying and failing to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
> The grocery stores aren't going to raise the overall price to compensate for losing the ability to price discriminate: that would result in less profit for them.
Allow me to explain how prices are set:
Consider an appliance store. They want to sell refrigerators. What do they do? They have 3 refrigerator lines - the stripper, the midline, and the lux. The purpose of the stripper is that is what they advertise, to bring customers into the store. The purpose of the midrange is to upsell those who come for the stripper, as they think the extra features are worth it. The lux is sold to the wealthy customers who just want to buy the best. (Not having a lux is means the retailer is throwing easy money away.)
The moneymaker is the midrange.
You'll see the same thing in the grocery store. The store advertises the price of milk, which is likely at below cost (called a "loss leader"). People come to buy the milk, which is always on the back wall of the store. The customer has to pass by all kinds of things to get to the milk, and they'll buy it. The most overpriced stuff will be next to the checkout line.
Cheeses come in cheap, midrange, and lux, too.
There's been an extensive amount of research on exactly how to set up the store to maximize profits, which is necessary as grocery stores have razor thin margins.
BTW, the article is paywalled. I have no idea how a grocery store is going to adjust prices at checkout, as the prices are marked.
Many stores are rolling out electronic price tags on the shelves, which can be rapidly updated wirelessly [1]. They could probably do the price adjustment there. I'd assume they wouldn't want to make it too blatant, which would be a challenge.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-digital-price-tag-sh...
I'm not going to order food at a restaurant if the menu has no prices on it, even if I'm a zillionaire.