Cyberpunk minus the cool robot arms

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.
- Probably end in a lawsuit
  I fucking dare them to change the price on me when I'm at the store in my wheelchair lmao easiest $200k I'll ever make.
- Grab a product at x price and when you scan it it’s y price.
  In Poland it's often a thing already with printed tags.
- 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

Another reason they want to ban facemasks

That's silly they should just scan the mask and offer coupons for n95s and cold medicine etc

don't forget 'if you don't like it shop somewhere else!' most 'somewhere else's available being premium stores or places doing the exact same thing
yeah i'll take my angry customership to target which already has digital tags, and costs more money or whole foods, which costs even more money

doing my grocery shopping in a goddamn morphsuit to avoid getting gouged

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.
- Are the prices going to be racist 🤔

This sounds so cruel and dystopian.

Surge pricing is just another name for price gouging.

I wonder how long this last until someone breaks them or tik tok mafia starts sharing RFID chip hacks for free meat.

RFID chip hacks for free meat.
Cyberpunk Trailer Park Boys
- New use for those Flipper devices 👀

I mean knock yourself out, but I'm still ringing up every item as a 50¢ can of generic tomato soup.

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.
- It's likely 'random' in the same way TSA random pat-downs are
- 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

Partner: Honey why are you putting ICP face paint on?

Me: Going grocery shopping.

The great malenko discount
- Partner: Well, don't forget the Faygo this time at least.

During a hurricane the price of water is going to shoot up like a fucking cricket match. What a cursed society we live in

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.

personalized prices based on income.
Every price becomes a % of people's income
The Gotah Program has been realised
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
- Yeah, Amazon Go. It wasn't personalized to your income or anything, and yes it was the ol' classic "by AI we mean a bunch of people in India".

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.

Now this shit.

Taking measures that make shoplifting obviously more moral than actually paying for things, absolute galaxy brained moves.

Capitalism does inspire innovation; though everyone who is not an investor or executive that can capitalize from said 'innovation' finds it repulsive.

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.
- 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.

If you see this, you leave the store and never return. And if you work there, you want to burn down the store first.

In much of the us there's only one or at most two options. Or there's a grocery store and walmart.

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.

Even though this wouldn't change the price at check out, I love the chaos this would cause
I almost feel bad for the minimum wage clerks who would have to deal with the angry deep discount shoppers.
- Iirc some places have laws that merchants must honor the price on the shelf to prevent screwing customers at the cash
how you can make them say what you want
ok, so I should steal them.
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.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
yewtu.be
inv.nadeko.net
yt.artemislena.eu
piped.video

Wow, just like in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report!

That’s the final straw, I’m giving up food once and for all.

I would simply not shop at the dystopian store center.

I’ll be surprised if this isn’t exactly what they find, that large numbers of customers avoid Kroger because of this
- 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.

Guess I'm wearing juggalo makeup and a some clothes that I'll define my shape next time I'm doing a shop lifting raid at Kroger.

I’m going to avoid Kroger all together by not moving to the midwest. They really fucked up this time

Kroger keeps buying other grocery chains. It's probably only a matter of time before they snag a big one where you live lol

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?

grocery price fixing? Couldn't imagine.
- I can't believe voters didn't like me

Ok, but the e-ink labels have been a thing in Europe for a bunch of years now.

But afaik we only have regional laws against surge or rural high pricing, not yet an EU directive.

How does profiling & face recognition work with GDPR?
\ No permanent storage but forced to agree with terms by entering the store?

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.

Time for another trip to Aldi I guess

wish mine wasn't such a long drive
can seriously fill my cart for like $100 with a weeks worth of stuff. meanwhile the close one $100 gets like 10 items
- Always shocked when we go to Walmart or Kroger for items they don't have at Aldi how inflated the costs are

How would targeting even work? They all have the same barcode.

They have to change the price for all of the items at once.

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"
Kroger encourages people to use their app for some discounts so it'll probably have something to do with that