Before going to the store to pick up some menstrual products for my partner, I shave and put on a full face of makeup so the cameras read me as female and don't give me the "clueless man" price gouge.
Imagine walking up to the products and watching the price go up. This will probably end in a lawsuit. Grab a product at x price and when you scan it it's y price. They can justify that in court, I don't care how business friendly the system is it's going to be struck down.
Well let's be clear about the tech they use. It's too slow to dynamically change based on who is shopping. The labels typically use eReader type displays which only update periodically for price updates. Need a 2450 cell battery that can last about 6 months with a single price change a week. Changing the prices more often drastically drains the battery life. And they require constant vigilance to make sure they haven't just randomly turned themselves off (seriously sometimes they randomly forget what price they should be showing).
I guess what I'm saying is if you want to ruin one of these stores those labels are expensive as fuck so bring a small jewelry kits and destroy as many as you can to fucking ruin a stores bottom line because no way in hell head office will approve sending out another thousand labels so they'll be forced to go back to paper labels.
There's definitely a limit with how hard big corps can fuck people on pricing. Even whole foods/amazon got in trouble for incorrectly weighing and overcharging people for prepared foods.
Grab a product at x price and when you scan it it's y price. They can justify that in court, I don't care how business friendly the system is it's going to be struck down.
Imagine being a customer service worker dealing with this shit, people already lose their fucking minds if "the price is wrong" even if they just read the wrong fuckin sign
This is going to be defended among the general public with claims like "Actually, if you game the system you get discounts, so only stupid people will suffer from this," in much the same way that McDonald's price hikes were excused/justified, isn't it?
Printing out a bunch of those "we fed 10,000 faces in to the computer this was what the average nana looks like" faces for each demographic category and wearing them as masks to see which race/age/gender is being offered the lowest prices.
I'm like 99% sure Walmart's self checkouts has started doing random false positives for bad ringups. Last two times I've been there I'll be swiping my stuff and despite getting the beep telling me it's been scanned it'll throw an alert to call someone over saying I added stuff to my bags without scanning. Then I had to wait while they went through my shit.
Whenever I'm at a self checkout and it beeps for an employee they don't even look at what caused it, just clear the alert and go back to waiting for more alerts
The only time I've personally seen price controls is during hurricane season. Hopefully, some company will do this shit, the government will actually do something, and then these things are killed forever.
Why even use labels at that point? Just use facial recognition at check-out to match customers to financial data and charge personalized prices based on income.
there was a, i want to say amazon? store that "did" that and by facial recognition--automatic pricing they actually meant laborers in a third world datacenter combed through video footage to tally people's bills
Fuckin' Kroger. Moved to an area where they and other big stores are the only options.
Where I used to live, they had a sub called "Lucky's Market" that was semi-fancy, but had decent deals. They killed it to move in directly, dragged their feet, then covid hit and they pivoted to deliver only. So I was already bitter having to shop there.
My opinion improved a bit when people there said they were unionized. Decent deals (but you gotta use their stupid card).
Then their self checkouts started yelling if you move too quickly or slowly scanning.
My store has a security guard with a gun present at all times. Some of them just have the blue polo, black military pants, combat boots, and gun. Other times the guard on duty will be in full CoD drag with a plate carrier (often without plates) boots bloused in to their black bdus. They always hang out right next to the exits with the self checkout.
You don't have to let them search your cart when you leave the store no matter how much they protest. I fucking love telling them "no" and just keep walking, the look of confusion and anger on their face
Which is why I advocate lazy shoplifting instead of the running out of the store variety.
Go in, have 70-ish dollars worth of merch in your cart, scan and pay for maaaaybe 15-20 (less if possible), and leave; easily repeatable, and you will get way less scrutiny. Admittedly harder to do if store has RFID gates
Exact method varies store to store; if the store has a pressure sensor in bag area, just don't bag your stuff up, scan it in cart with scanner gun, and make it look convincing that you're getting everything if there are store staff members watching. If asked why you're not bagging, just say you're trying to help the environment (which you are also doing by helping screw over a megacorporation). And always, be nice to the staff (sans rent a pig), they're just trying to get by, and being nice to them also makes it easier on you as you will likely get less attention.
Did you know you can buy the tags online? and with some electrical know-how you can make them say what you want. A little time and effort and now you have a tag that says whatever price you want on it. If they got switched at the store at that point, well, how would you know? Just work in teams to make the switch less obvious on the cameras.
I thought the video was going to be about making fake barcodes, for example, photocopy the barcode of the cheap item, print it to a sticker, put the sticker on the expensive item of the same weight, enjoy discount, or be about generating unauthorized clearance barcodes, but going to the grocery store and changing them all to say cool things like crakkka down, ACAB, America Delenda Est, etc. is cool too.
Someone did that something like that once when I worked at a best buy. Someone returned a cheap go pro in an expensive go pro's box. Then I accidentally sold it to someone else, who was irate when they came back.
The Walgreens near me just quietly removed those freezer door screens that just give you information about the products in the freezer and went back to, you know, just being glass you can see through to see what’s in the freezer. So yeah wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up backfiring on them.
This violates an absolute necessity for a market to qualify as a free market, imo. In order to have a free market, the consumer needs to have access to enough information to make an informed choice (which is why healthcare can't be a free market, but I digress). If I can't even know what the price of a bunch of bananas is going to be, I just have to YOLO it at the register and hope the AI didn't wig the fuck out because of a flash stock market crash or something and mark them up 100,000x between the shelf and the register, it's hard to argue the case for that being a free market. I guess it still technically is, because I could always just say "take the bananas off, please" at the register, but I'm sure these geniuses will come up with something to try and prevent that.
To those who say they wouldn't shop there, there's a lot of folks who don't have a lot of choice in grocers; there's plenty enough towns and communities that have just one (or none, and you just have to drive, if you can afford a car, or else go wherever your massively insufficient local transit system will take you). I wouldn't choose to shop at a store that did this, but then I also have that privilege. I also think another big question to ask is what happens if the big grocery chains collude to more or less implement this together?
I lived in Appalachia, Walmart was about twenty minutes a way, the next closest grocery store of any real size was a solid hour away. I fucking hated that I had to shop there but at least their self checkout didn't have scales so "discounts" were common.
Bazinga mindset is about trying to manifest outcomes with idealism and venture capital, over and over again, as long as the venture capital keeps flowing.
If you mean for the personalized price changing, presumably it makes a "profile" for you in the system so that, at checkout, the machine knows "that product + that face = that price"
I will tell you as a minimum wage worker who had to manually change the price/sales tags every week, I would have been ecstatic for them to just have some system that does it automatically.
Idk about the surge pricing and facial recognition shit tho.