Maybe Not Such a Good Idea?
A number of stores are going to digital price tags on their store shelves. This would relieve them of the expense of having an employee go around the store and replace the printed price tags each time they need to change a price.
On the surface, this would seem to be a labor-saving innovation on the order of when stores went to UPC codes instead of putting price tags on each individual item. As the price of labor goes up, being able to save some money in that area would help keep prices down.
However, there's a lot of suspicion and pushback from consumer groups. In particular, there's concern about potential abuses of a "dynamic pricing" system. For instance, there's concerns about the possibility of combining it with tracking systems to alter prices on the fly based upon perceptions of what a given shopper will be willing to pay, rather than the average of the population that shops at that store.
That's the creepiest take on it, given that it would only work if the store were running a very granular form of surveillance on individual customer's buying habits and movements through the store (something more doable in an app-based transaction system like ride-sharing or room-sharing apps). But there are also concerns about retailers implementing something like "surge pricing" and raising or lowering prices on the fly throughout the day, especially if they have a brief situation where they can take advantage of a captive market.
OTOH, the anti-price-gouging legislation that's being talked about is apt to be a cure worse than the disease, leading to fewer goods on the shelves and people ending up paying far more for gray-market and outright black market products of uncertain safety and reliability. However, it looks like major retailers such as Kroger are concerned enough about consumer pushback that they are putting out reassuring statements about how they plan to use digital price tags only to reduce labor costs and offer customers lower prices.
On the surface, this would seem to be a labor-saving innovation on the order of when stores went to UPC codes instead of putting price tags on each individual item. As the price of labor goes up, being able to save some money in that area would help keep prices down.
However, there's a lot of suspicion and pushback from consumer groups. In particular, there's concern about potential abuses of a "dynamic pricing" system. For instance, there's concerns about the possibility of combining it with tracking systems to alter prices on the fly based upon perceptions of what a given shopper will be willing to pay, rather than the average of the population that shops at that store.
That's the creepiest take on it, given that it would only work if the store were running a very granular form of surveillance on individual customer's buying habits and movements through the store (something more doable in an app-based transaction system like ride-sharing or room-sharing apps). But there are also concerns about retailers implementing something like "surge pricing" and raising or lowering prices on the fly throughout the day, especially if they have a brief situation where they can take advantage of a captive market.
OTOH, the anti-price-gouging legislation that's being talked about is apt to be a cure worse than the disease, leading to fewer goods on the shelves and people ending up paying far more for gray-market and outright black market products of uncertain safety and reliability. However, it looks like major retailers such as Kroger are concerned enough about consumer pushback that they are putting out reassuring statements about how they plan to use digital price tags only to reduce labor costs and offer customers lower prices.