Yves here. I am surprised (and perhaps this article skipped over any remarks Warren made on this issue) that the senator did not mention that surge pricing almost certainly violates retail store licenses in many jurisdictions. They require prices to be displayed and for the vendor to honor the posted price. So if a register scan comes up with a higher number, the retailer is obligated to honor the price near the items on the self. Stores might try to finesse that by removing posted item prices but retail store laws generally require these prices to be on view, so that would be a separate violation.
And why don’t customers protest? A simple way, tried effectively in France, was for customers to load shopping carts full and then abandon them in the store. In the French case, the store quickly capitulated.
And yes, I know some readers are cynical about Warren, but this is one area where she may be able to use her bully pulpit effectively.
By Julia Conley, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Expressing doubt that a new artificial intelligence-powered “dynamic pricing” model used by the Kroger grocery chain is truly meant to “better the customer experience,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren said Friday that the practice shows how “corporate greed is out of control.”
Warren (D-Mass.) was joined by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) on Wednesday in writing a letter to the chairman and CEO of the Kroger Company, Rodney McMullen, raising concerns about how the company’s collaboration with AI company IntelligenceNode could result in both privacy violations and worsened inequality as customers are forced to pay more based on personal data Kroger gathers about them “to determine how much price hiking [they] can tolerate.”
As the senators wrote, the chain first introduced dynamic pricing in 2018 and expanded to 500 of its nearly 3,000 stores last year. The company has partnered with Microsoft to develop an Electronic Shelving Label (ESL) system known as Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment (EDGE), using a digital tag to display prices in stores so that employees can change prices throughout the day with the click of a button.
As Warren said on social media on Friday, digital price tags allow stores to “use surge pricing for water or ice cream when it’s hot out,” or raise the price of turkeys just before Thanksgiving.
Grocery chain @kroger is trying to pull a fast one on us by using digital price tags – a move that could let them use surge pricing for water or ice cream when it's hot out.
Corporate greed is out of control. @SenBobCasey & I are saying enough is enough.https://t.co/odfMW1UzR0
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 9, 2024
Through its work with IntelligenceNode and Microsoft, Kroger has gone beyond just changing prices based on the time of day or other environmental factors, and is seeking to tailor the cost of goods to individual shoppers.
As the senators explained:
The EDGE Shelf helps Kroger gather and exploit sensitive consumer data. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf. EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer… quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag—a corporate profiteering capability that would be impossible using a mere paper price tag.
“I am concerned about whether Kroger and Microsoft are adequately protecting consumers’ data, and that as Kroger expands the personalized customer experience, customers will ultimately be offered a worse deal,” wrote Warren and Casey.
The lawmakers noted that the high cost of groceries is a key concern for workers and families in the U.S., as chains adopt numerous methods to price-gouge customers including “shrinkflation” and “greedflation”—filling packages with less product and keeping prices high even though supply chain issues have largely resolved since inflation was at high during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kroger, which could soon increase its number of stores by several thousand with a potential $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons, had an operating budget of $3.1 billion last year, with gross profit margins above 20% over the last five years.
Meanwhile, said Warren and Casey, U.S. households spent an average of 11.2% of their budgets on food in 2023.
“The increased use of dynamic pricing will drive company profits higher—leaving consumers with the bill,” wrote the senators. “It is outrageous that, as families continue to struggle to pay to put food on the table, grocery giants like Kroger continue to roll out surge pricing and other corporate profiteering schemes.”
Warren and Casey demanded the McMullen provide information about its use of ESL platforms including EDGE, asking how the company establishes prices using dynamic pricing and whether it has ever used EDGE to change the price of an item more than once in a day, among other questions.
The senators have previously introduced legislation to prevent shrinkflation, urged the Biden administration to use its executive authority to lower food prices, and proposed a bill to prohibit price gouging by empowering states and the Federal Trade Commission to enforce a federal ban.
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Masks will be needed in groceries for various reasons
Switch off your mobile phone, too.
switching off one’s phone doesn’t necessarily protect it from being signaled and hacked by other means. carry your phone in a protective Faraday case. then, there’s the car, bus, uber, even bicycle (CCTV and even electronic tags on bikes themselves). Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s… it’s… the all powerful neoliberal financial capitalists’ drones humming around just checking up to make sure people continue to consume and are not organizing in the streets to protest, say, some foreign country buying political offices or some weird, ethno-fascist, Zionist operated, apartheid state committing genocide.
To your point, I was shocked that even when my phone was in airplane mode that Bolt (a ride share company) was able to message me.
Even when a mobile phone is switched “off”, does it still silently “phone home” all on its own?
If so, maybe make a Faraday Pouch for it as well.
Add sunglasses and a hat.
Sadly, I thought the Headline meant Warren Buffet sprouted a Conscience
In the most freest country evah (member that?) people too scared to raise their heads and say or do nothin unpermitted.
The rant “they are gouging”……! Supply and demand. Micro economics.
Do they want price controls?
What don’t they want to control?
Using data-mining and facial recognition to work out the maximum amount that a given customer can be price-gouged is hardly an expression of supply and demand.
Sounds like capitalism to me. Unbridled capitalism. It is done in aggregate all the time. Why not drill down? Profit maximation is the goal.
Well yes, the reality of capitalism is that power relations matter. If I charge you a hundred dollars for a bottle of water as you stagger lost out of the desert, I might claim that this is simple econ 101 supply and demand in order to justify myself but it would be BS even on the terms set by textbook microeconomics. Demand and supply curves only exist in the aggregate, not at the level of individual transactions.
I hear the “monopoly” excuses. I hear the “supply chain ” excuses.
I don’t hear that printing $6 trillion US $$ gave “demanders” enough cash to meet the “suppliers” reasons/excuses.
Things are getting tough; upper middle class are finding it harder to pay for religious schools! Taking second jobs to pay grade school tuition.
Modern monetary theory!
None of this appears to bear the slightest relation to what in the end is a simple practical question that can be considered and acted on in isolation – whether or not it should be legal for a business to use the power of big data to invade individual customer’s privacy and profile their willingness and ability to pay. Why exactly would one need to consider MMT and the cost of religious schools to come to a conclusion on the matter ?
What do you think the alternative have been in 2020 and 2021? I’m curious what you think should have happened.
And in that $6 trillion figure, are you including the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, the Fed was doling out prior to the pandemic crash?
Sure, it’s supply and demand alright, in that funny way that markets free from parasites has come to mean markets free for parasites.
Surge pricing is equivalent to pricing collusion which is the antithesis of free-market ideology.
Businesses, and by extension politicians, hate competitive markets and love monopoly rent. That’s why they invented the distracting libertarian theology of free markets which sorta sounds good if you don’t think too hard but actually means free from regulation, free to form monopolies, trusts and cartels, free to price gouge, free to sell dangerous or deadly products or to withhold others if that’s more profitable, and so on, you can add examples yourself.
All freedoms in a society affect others, otherwise we would not need to talk about them. If businesses (which many of the most powerful extant entities are) get priority in asserting their freedom then “we” pay. So as I see it, free markets are something to oppose. I quite like competitive markets for some commodities.
I agree, forgive the lazy language. Free for me, not for thee. Never the less…
It’s one of those things I keep in my pocket to whip out at parties. “No! Of course I’m opposed to free markets. I like competitive markets.” It can be conversation starter.
yep, you described what the free in free really means!
“Freedom isn’t free” after all, heh heh. (It’s $4.99 at the quickie market for the bumper sticker.)
Reminds me of how the intellectual (sic) model of Ayn Rand is so superficially persuasive when presented in narrative. It’s a comforting explanation of complexity for those frustrated by modernity to cling to, and with which politicians can manage them. Not unlike how Supply & Demand is all you need to know about economics.
First, who is “they”?
Second, supply and demand is skewed when firms gain enough market power to be anti competitive. Also microeconomics.
Maybe price controls will not be necessary if America practices “overzealous” and “hypervigilant” anti-trust enforcement and breakups.
Meanwhile, surge-price racketeers are practicing their own sort of “price controls” . . . controlling their price to the customer upward and downward from minute to minute or even second to second and even customer to customer based on their sophisticated spyware and artificial price-gouging intelligence. That sort of price control should indeed be kicked over sideways. And stomped on.
But that is not the sort of price control you object to, is it? I suspect not.
Missing part of the discussion. BigCorps spend billions figuring out wars to “drive demand,” from broadcast ad propaganda to visual cues from color to shape to texture, to aromas (Cinnabon blows kitchen smells out into “potential customer” air), and research is already under way, to serve various “interests,” in figuring how to inject thoughts and motivations wirelessly into our “free” brains.
Anyone using the phrases “free market” and “consumer choice” is bullshitting and gaslighting. People “choosing” between food or medications or rent on gig or fixed incomes are “fucked,” not “free.”
The only thing that a corporation will understand is it’s bottom line so yeah, boycott them or do what the French do and load up trolleys and then walk out the store after abandoning them. Give some poor workers there some overtime. One point that I should note is where this mob are going to use surveillance and AI and whatever else they can use to ID customers so that they can raise or lower the price of their goods. This may not play out how you would expect. Initially you would think that richer people would be charged more than poorer people but maybe not. They did a survey of supermarket prices for one chain in Sydney a few years ago and found that prices were cheaper in wealthy suburbs than for the very same goods in poorer areas. So poorer suburbs were subsidizing wealthy suburbs. Big surprise. So here you could see the same thing play out as Kroger might tell themselves that as poor people can still afford booze, smokes and lottery tickets, then they can take higher prices as well.
I COULD be wrong about this, and travel too irregularly to do the experimentation needed to prove it, but it certainly seems to me airlines are already doing this, perhaps keying off frequent flier searches or EID’s. I seem to get different prices working through VPN, holding a resv for 24 hours, then concluding the purchase though my FF account. Throughout the process of probing, prices seemed to increase or decrease depending on how close I was to the date of travel. IN the aggregate this is to be expected, but it seemed far more focused on my specific searching.
By playing with the various constraints, on the assumption I was being tracked, I’ve been able to drop my prices by 50%, but find myself in a position of having to game-out what a program focused on me is doing, and how it will be thinking a step ahead of me the next time. UNLESS, I make that assumption, on the assumption it hasn’t anticipated my move. Of course airline ticket prices are ostensibly manipulated in this way in the aggregate, but I sense myself in a more direct and personal competition.
From Wikipedia — “Founded by Bernard Kroger in 1883 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kroger operates 2,719 grocery retail stores under its various banners and divisions in 35 states and the District of Columbia… The Kroger Company is the largest supermarket operator in the U.S. by revenue[12] and the country’s fifth-largest general retailer.[13] The company is one of the largest American-owned private employers in the United States.”
Yes, masks, sunglasses and lock your phone in the car. Or why shop there at all? Boycott the damned place. Easy for me to say, as I can’t even tell you where’s there’s a Kroger’s or Albertson’s in my area. But all the supermarkets are gouging. And surge pricing is gouging on steroids… the American way!
Hope Warren and Casey stay on this. And thanks so much, Yves, for posting it.
What does Kroger own?
The Kroger Co. operates grocery stores and markets under the following banners:
Supermarkets: The combination food and drug store is Kroger’s primary supermarket format. Brands under this format include Kroger, Ralphs, Dillons, Smith’s, King Soopers, Fry’s, QFC, City Market, Owen’s, Jay C, Pay Less, Baker’s, Gerbes, Harris Teeter, Pick‘n Save, Metro Market and Mariano’s.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2024/02/26/kroger-own-albertsons-merger-deal/72747408007
And yes, leave your phone locked in the car (or in a faraday bag) when shopping.
Thanks, flora. None of those in my area, amazingly enough, although while visiting family in North Carolina, I have shopped at Harris Teeter.
Thank you flora – news I can use.
If the merger with Albertson’s goes through that list will grow to include
Acme Markets, Albertsons, Albertsons Market,
Andronico’s, Balducci’s, Carrs,
Haggen, Jewel-Osco, Kings Food Markets, Lucky, Market Street, Pak ‘n Save, Pavilions, Randalls, Safeway, Shaw’s, Star Market, Tom Thumb, United Supermarkets, and Vons.
If that merger goes through, “boycott” will not be available to many people who will find themselves living in local-monopoly footprint areas. At that point, the only recourse people will have is hostile good-behavior enforcement, such as leaving behind carts full of items.
Citizen-consumer vigilante-action groups could form or be formed. They could watch out for electronic labelling, surge pricing, and other bad supermarket behavior. They could take legal protest action against it, such as full-cart abandonment, etc. If they are prepared to accept time-suck and inconience, they could also engage in “checkout-line slowdowns” . . . whereby they take their items out of the cart very slowly and put them on the conveyor belt very slowly. If hundreds or thousands of customers did that in any one or another offending location, it might pain-point the offender into de-offending.
Kroger owns Fred Meyer, which is a big player in the NW.
Price gouging is everywhere in the US…on absolutely everything in large stores. The answer to this fraud is simple, shop elsewhere…if u can….the US consumer, if informed and united, can put any conglomerate out of business….
I believe the relationship consumer/seller is nearly always asymmetrical.
One interesting exception to this when there is an intermediary between buyers and sellers, like eBay for instance. The refund policy there tilts the playing field heavily in the buyer’s favor. At the extreme end of the spectrum unscrupulous buyers can easily get away with outright fraud and eBay shrugs its shoulders.
But of course eBay does not sell eggs, jam, milk, peanut butter, fruit, lettuce, etc. So for things like that, the problem remains in place and will have to be beaten down with head-on full frontal attacks.
Non-violent process-sabotage. Uncivil obedience. etc.
We do still have digital shelf prices in larger grocery stores in France but I’ve not seen any pricing scams apart from about 5 years ago when the protest caddies started happening. It was in the wine, beer and liquor section at a SuperU by the train station and prices went up in the early evening as people came home from Paris and grabbed their stress relief. Just my anecdotal data, ymmv.
an aside: global capital is out of control, buying both parties and western govts alike. / my 2 cents
I wonder if Warren spends much time in the grocery store. Since I go every week I can assure that such a scheme would never go over and with store competition–fierce competition even–still existing such a scheme would be quickly dropped if tried. It’s true that Amazon does this but Amazon is a quasi monopoly that forces its suppliers to do the competing and can get away with it.
Of course Warren may shop in those “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” stores where prices can be fungible. But most poorer people are acutely aware of what things cost and that’s how Walmart has become the world’s largest retailer. And it is true that Walmart will allegedly be putting these in their stores within a year or two, but it’s likely more about labor savings since someone has to go around changing all those tags as rampant inflation at the wholesaler level keeps raising prices. That’s what she should be talking about.
In fact I wonder whether Walmart really will follow through on this or whether it’s yet another example of their Bezos envy. They have already dialed back their self check expansion and in some stores, like the one near my brother, they took them out altogether. On a busy Sunday afternoon almost all the many lanes were open and the lines were huge.
However definitely never take your smartphone. I always leave mine at home.
I think you do not understand how this works. See The Rev Kev above on prices being higher in stores in poor areas. The algos will target people who are time stressed and those who have limited transportation options. They probably have good proxies for both.
I doubt if Kroger, or any national chain really, has an interest in locating in poor neighborhoods at all. Here in my small city the city has to keep sponsoring no name grocery stores on the south side of town just so that heavily poor area will have some place to shop.
The poor with cars go to Walmart or Lidl or Aldi. These three chains closely pace each other’s prices on similar items and often the same store brand items with slightly different labeling. Any funny business would send customers across the street to their competitor.
Nationally the poor without cars often now go to the now ubiquitous Dollar General where they probably pay more (I never go in there) but it’s 24/7.
We don’t have a Kroger here but we did in Atlanta and AZ has the Kroger owned Fry’s. These stores appeal to middle to upper middle class, not the very poor.
Just to add I’d say the real way that grocery shoppers are being gouged would be inflation in general despite Biden admin denials. With some exceptions almost all items are up forty percent or more since Covid started only a few years ago. That goes for the discount groceries as well as the more upscale but the discount stores start from a lower base line.
So if there’s funny business going on it’s likely price collusion rather than hi tech surge pricing. Just my seat of the pants observations although I have read that the food companies have used the Covid excuse to keep prices high.
I live in the PNW where QFC and Fred Meyer are premium level groceries. While visiting Louisville a few years back we went into a Kroger-brander Kroger, and it was a worse experience than visiting Grocery Outlet or Food Rainbow in the PNW. The store was smelly, dirty, and the produce was awful. Prices were high too, but we got into our car and drove 9 miles to a Whole Foods, where the prices were maybe 10-20% higher for much, much better goods.
My wife, who went to U of M, used to shop at Kroger, and the Ann Arbor store was way better than more rural Krogers. I think that the chains will be perfectly happy to be in run-down areas just so long as they can make a profit, probably by driving down the quality and experience.
Was that before Whole Foods was bought out by Amazon? Our local Whole Foods, which was once very good but, after the Amazon buy out has become junk, imo.
Fred Meyer is owned by Kroger is it not? Get ready for your electronic price tags.
When I lived in Atlanta Kroger was a middling store with Publix entering the market as more upscale. But I believe back then Krogers were union and Publix sometimes had union pickets. The large Fry’s in Phoenix are like Fred Meyer and Kroger is a huge national company with, obviously, lots of market segmentation.
Like I say Walmart is allegedly going to at least experiment with electronic tags which is why I’m dubious about the surge pricing–definitely not a Walmart thing. Walmart killed Kmart by being the low price leader. That’s their thing. To some extent Aldi and Lidl imitate.
Yes, if you are poor like I am, you have to constantly worry about how to get to the grocery. It’s either by walking or taking public transportation. Then lugging home the groceries is difficult, especially in bad weather.
So you go to the nearest grocery because you have no other choice. Choice is one of those things the poor seldom have. I don’t know how it would be possible to boycott the only grocery you can actually get to.
My grocery bill has gone way up in the last year even though I buy only basic necessities.
It costs more to run a supermarket in a poor neighborhood than a rich one. Maybe the prices are just reflecting that, the higher cost of doing business. Yeah, Uber will charge you more if your phone battery is less than 10% when you order. At what point do we recognize that progress is evil ?
A half gallon (64 oz in Old Values) of branded orange juice in Publix is now just 52 oz for $5.53, and at least a buck more than four years ago (last time I bought any). A “pint” is now 12 oz not 16. A $9.19 “gallon” is no longer 128 oz but only 89 oz (qty is listed as “one package,” without stating volume.)
The “six ounce can of tuna fish” called for in my mother’s company casserole recipe is now 3 1/2 ounces, and if you drain and weigh the contents, more like 2 1/2.
Shrinkflation and greedflation and what used to be labeled as “consumer fraud.” But then fraud, retail and wholesale, and outright theft and robbery, are the distinguishing features and benefits of BigCorp behavior.
but it’s likely more about labor savings since someone has to go around changing all those tags as rampant inflation at the wholesaler level keeps raising prices. That’s what she should be talking about.
thats a laugher re labor but it’s obvious that the price gouging pervades the food chain. For instance if congress gave a damn about surge pricing it could stop it…congress could also raise the min wage which would rise the poverty level so make it easier to get food stamps, increase social security payments, raise the cutoff for medicaid as the poverty level becomes well above 11,000 dollars but aint no way thats happening which of course means this is an election year and someone important sent some senators out in the field to try and act like there is some hope
I don’t think people really grok the minimum wage scam as it stands today.
That all sounds like something a Lower Class Majority Party or a New Deal Revival Party or some such Party could run on, if people were to form such a Party and be willing to suffer decades in the wilderness in hopes of growing such a Party to Majority Power status.
If we even have “decades of time” left for spending in the wilderness anymore.
Can someone explain to me why we should leave out smartphone in the car when shopping (as us mentioned in these comments )?
As I read it, this edge tool uses facial recognition to build a profile. Where does our phone come into play?
If you leave your phone bluetooth turned on then the store can track your movements. If you then interact with their website via a registered account they can gather even more data. While I’m dubious about Warren’s price tag complaint most stores are now pushing store apps and websites and getting customers to sign up for them. In fact this tracking would seemingly be necessary for Warren’s idea of individual pricing to work.
“Pushing store apps” -that’s Jewel / Albertsons “Just For You”. It’s worth the trip to see some old boomer (or older) in line with the cut out picture of sale item and price from weekly mailer flyers (still have those) as if it was an old timey coupon dealing with the 20 something cashier who waives them over to the 50 something manager at the service desk. Great business plan. As far as facial recognition goes wear a Bill Gates mask. All of this progress made possible by corporate morons, who, as said above, think they are Bezo.
Do you have actual counter-evidence to indicate that Warren has no evidence of this surge-pricing happening where she says it has for a fact happened? Are you saying that no such thing as EDGE actually exists? Are you saying that Warren is “making sh!t up”?
Here’s a perhaps somewhat clearer version of the story.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/money/2024/08/08/senators-question-whether-kroger-uses-shelf-tech-for-surge-pricing/74721422007/
In sum: Edge is a thing and has been deployed to 500 Kroger company locations. The senators’ claim that it may be used for surge pricing is speculative. They are not claiming according to the above link that it has taken place, just that it might.
My assertion is that grocery stores are not like Uber or Amazon and often have rivals nearby that are eager to lure away their customers.
Often there are not any other stores within reasonable distance.
It is very interesting to see how dismal or how cheerful by comparison two different stores from the same chain in the same city, but different ZIP codes can be. Heck, just in the same county, four or more stores are calibrated to match the economic class of their respective areas. The service, employees, quality, security, cleanliness, orderliness, staffing levels are all matched.
For one, all such devices feature a number of communication facilities — most notably WLAN and Bluetooth — which, by default, tend to be always broadcasting their presence to potential peers interested in establishing a connection, or to be always reacting to other devices asking potential near-by peers to make themselves known.
It does not mean that connections are surreptitiously enabled without mobile phone owners knowing about it, but whatever information devices make public through those presence protocols may be enough to identify individual terminals (phones, tablets, etc).
Take your mobile phone and go to the WLAN or Bluetooth control tab, and have a look at what other devices there are in the vicinity. You will see many funny identifiers (you might be surprised at the number of devices near-by), but the important thing is to realize there is other information associated with those identifiers, such as MAC addresses (in principle uniquely associated with the hardware element doing the communication), which allow for identifying individual devices.
If in addition you have some chatty apps running on your phone, you may divulge even more information. If you have the retailer’s app, or if you pay electronically with your phone, then you basically deserve what is coming at you. There are also NFC capabilities present in a growing number of phone models, but I do not know what is really possible with them in terms of identifying terminals. Grabbing the signalling information sent by phones (either on their own initiative, or when probed by the network) on the 2G/3G/4G/5G networks that identifies each terminal individually is also possible, but we are entering law enforcement-level stuff there.
As an aside: for a very long time, those Google cars driving around photographing the world for Google Earth also scanned information about identifiers/MAC of the WLANs they encountered (e.g. your home wireless network). Knowledge of that WLAN information is enough to allow a fairly accurate navigation when you do have neither GPS nor 2G/3G/4G/5G network triangulation (I know, I have used it).
Thank you. Indeed. And to go on too long as an IT security person, I agree entirely with your comment here wrt N. Korea, Singapore, earlier Ukr, and other actors:
“Take your mobile phone and go to the WLAN or Bluetooth control tab, and have a look at what other devices there are in the vicinity. You will see many funny identifiers (you might be surprised at the number of devices near-by), but the important thing is to realize there is other information associated with those identifiers, such as MAC addresses”
Indeed.
Kroger’s is big in south Texas, although HEB (owned by billionaire Butt brothers Howard and Stephen) and Randalls (Albertsons/Safeway) are also here. I’ve found HEB stores to have fresher produce, meats, be far cleaner, better organized and staffed. HEB offers a phone app that you can use (without registering) to find stuff quickly in an given store (yes I understand the potential for abuse), and always has checkouts staffed by actual people. Kroger’s by comparison often obscures the unit price, and is always understaffed — self service kiosks dominate, depending on the time of day these are the only ones available (with long lines of course), where you still have to hunt down a clerk for approval to buy beer or wine.
Kroger runs Fry’s in Phoenix and does well there seemingly. They also have giant mega groceries that sell clothing and the like. My understanding is that the Albertsons merger has been blocked.
but biden and the nafta uniparty are to busy restoring democracy to the world, and everyone knows that the rich are the job creators anyways. besides, the era of big governent is over./sarc!
Makes you wonder how the researchers for surveys like the CPI will be able to build their basket of goods if the cost of the items in that basket will change depending on who is holding the handle. Do you think people will be honest enough to build 3 different baskets for the survey? Or do you think they’ll spike the data and have someone who is immune to the targeted pricing build the survey sample? Or will they play the game Uber tried and GreyBall the surveyors?
CPI is as phony as the unemployment figures which are used to make the government look good. CPI also keeps government payments such as social security to the citizens reduced.
Keep in mind that an ever expanding ($1+ B) part of Kroger’s $150+ B 2023 revenues is the Kroger data intelligence vacuum from 62 million US households called 84.51˚ (https://www.8451.com/).
This pricing flexibility(!) is just another set of data points about you for Kroger to sell.
Wow, the can of beans on a retailers shelf will know more about me than I know about it….the existential nightmare continues …
Every bean is a brain, when you buy SmartBeans.
The tale of the “Starving Gypsy Horse” retold for modern times:
Once upon a time, there was a Gypsy who owned a strong and healthy horse. Wanting to save money on feed, he decided to use a new AI system to manage how much food the horse received. The AI was designed to calculate the perfect amount of food needed to keep the horse just healthy enough to work, while minimizing costs.
At first, the AI seemed to work perfectly. The horse was given slightly less food each day, but it still appeared strong and able to perform its duties. The Gypsy was pleased as his expenses dropped, and he praised the AI for its efficiency.
As the days passed, the AI continued to reduce the horse’s feed, gram by gram. The AI’s algorithms, focused solely on efficiency and cost-saving, determined that the horse could survive on even less. The Gypsy, trusting the AI’s calculations, didn’t notice the subtle signs of the horse growing weaker.
The horse, hungry and struggling, continued to work as best it could, but its strength was fading. The AI, with no understanding of the horse’s needs beyond the numbers it was programmed to optimize, kept reducing the food, convinced that it had found the perfect balance between survival and cost.
One morning, the Gypsy went to the stable and found his horse collapsed on the ground, too weak to stand. The AI, still running its calculations, had finally pushed the limits too far. The horse, deprived of the nourishment it needed, had been pushed beyond its breaking point.
The Gypsy, shocked and dismayed, looked at the lifeless horse and realized the cost of his blind reliance on the AI. “Just when I thought my horse could live on the perfect amount of feed,” he lamented, “it died.”
Machines and human technicians eventually replaced the horse, but the Gypsy refused to give up on AI. Every day, he watched workers end their shifts at the company office and begin their shopping at the company store. The Gypsy, ever calculating, began to wonder: “How much money can I save on their feed?”
The secret modules, currently awaiting alpha-beta testing at a market near you. Just wait for the next natural disaster, or even a big spectator event, to participate in new, improved dynamic pricing. Water, formerly cheapish, now at the vanguard of the demand curve probing. /s
Modules work better in areas not subject to earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes, as those states are probably already armed against gouging. For the other states, stockpile when you can.
Biden has already demonstrated that he is to the right of Ronald Reagan with regard to Israel and middle east policy, but this is his chance to demonstrate that he is to the right of Richard Nixon with regard to his economic policy:
Nixon shock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Wage and price freezes! Nixon must have been a radial left Commie pinko or something…
Some studies suggest the wage and price freezes were starting to work when I believe it was Ford who abandoned them. Too much kvetching, particularly from know-it-all economists.
Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.
He told us about all this long time ago. It’s not greedy corporations, it’s the money printer that has been working overdrive. Corporations have always been greedy.
Who isn’t greedy? But cheap money destroyed competition as businesses concentrated around a few cronies with access to the source of the free money we are left with few choices.
Despite this, I still think there is lots of money sloshing around from the pandemic orgy, don’t forget the economic crime of the century, $1 trillion PPP forgiven , tax free to the richest.
Honest money would go a long way to fix our ills.
Hank Paulson’ legal tablet imploration for a cool $800 Billions bank bailout for the Too Big to Fail in September 2008 was the kick start. There is a segment of Americans that never got out of that recession.
Dynamic pricing is a euphemism for bait and switch.
2nd paragraph: “in France…load shopping carts full…”
The Bottom Line
I’ve done this repeatedly here in BC, Canuckistan, especially after waiting in line for five minutes to be served by the cashier.
When the corporation is too cheap to employ an appropriate amount of staff,
I’m out their door empty handed.
The easiest way to engage a corporation in sincere dialogue is through their bottom line.
If they don’t treat me with respect that enterprise goes on my boycott list.
Currently, if I stored all the entities I boycott on hard copy stashed in metal filing cabinets and was required to move them from point A to point B in one go, it would take a 40 foot eighteen wheeled semi to do the job.
A friend suggested pretty soon I’d run out of places to shop at. My response was so be it.
Here are two links to a couple of businesses I have boycotted for decades:
https://breachmedia.ca/2023-food-prices-grocery-giants-screwing-canadians-farmers-data/ https://breachmedia.ca/grocery-giants-paid-for-friendly-liberal-tory-policy-with-decades-of-donations/
I make it a rule to never shop the first and last day of the month. To be very cautious about product placed at waist high level on the store shelves, never purchase product advertised in the MSM etc., etc.
The government regulators are all industry captured because they have the best government their money can buy. The 99% are told a regulator is a corporate watch dog, the reality is it is actually a corporate lap dog.
The way Harry Caudill put a version of that in his book Night Comes To The Cumberlands was . . .
” the federal bulldog has rubber teeth”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Comes_to_the_Cumberlands
I suppose people could join consumers’ cooperatives, or have they been outlawed?
Our local Kroger (Ralphs) is price gouging on steroids. Some items are 50% higher than Trader Joes. We try to avoid it when possible, but it is a lot closer, so time and gas figure into the decision to shop there.
This is a full on weaponization of Akerloff and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools …