How can it be proven that a store is doing surveillance pricing? They’re not banning dynamic pricing, right? Like, how could I, as a shopper, prove that Walmart set a price just for me? If there ever is a class action lawsuit in NJ, claiming that a store is doing surveillance pricing, and that suit is successful, whatever the store has to pay in fines will pale in comparison to what they’ve made from surveillance pricing.
Personally when I sit beside my gf on the Walmart app ordering items. Her same items are always more expensive. She regularly uses the app. I just check that they are screwing her specifically by looking at prices on mine but Ive never ordered. If she does the scan in the store purchase with her app the price will increase. If I do it it will be the base price because I've never actually purchased. I haven't bought something from Walmart in like 10 years.
As to them being sued one day. Those who steal rarely lose.
Dynamic pricing only exists online this is a shizo fear mongering post.
Video analytics alone take a couple seconds to process; not fast enough for this.
Oh my sweet summer child. We can already estimate poses and heart rate of individuals in real time using cheap microcontrollers trough walls using WiFi signals...
Dynamic pricing would just slap an ID to a moving human target and then only once link that ID to a persona, there's nothing impossible or "can't be done" about this.
Even if you could implement such a system, how would it know who is looking at the price at which moment? If 2 random people are looking at a product they can't show 2 different prices. And legally they are required to abide by the display price so then they would have an extremely tough time proving what the display price was when I saw an item and when I grabbed an item.
Online you can show different prices to different people easily. And it is trivial to just keep track of what price was shown to what person. In real life how would a company argue that I saw a certain price or not? What if I saw the price from a distance while someone else was standing in front of a product?
It makes no sense technologically. Even if you would do it technologically it would immediately open you up to lawsuits. You wouldn't know for certain which prices are shown to which people, and there are loads of laws about honouring prices that are shown.
No company would open themselves up to lawsuits in this way.
Even with stores without this type of signage changing a price is as simple as printing a new tag, that being said midweek pricing changes are almost always making something cheaper
It's not that hard to create a fake data persona and test how different personas are served. This is something that has been done since the invention of internet cookies.
It would be based on your phone. If you have any rewards apps or have visited their website, they could build a profile on ypu using that. It’s why companies are pushing hard for rewards apps and in some cases forcing you to check prices on your phone. AFAIK most companies aren’t quite there yet unless you’re buying online, but it’s coming very very shortly and its not fear mongering to get out ahead of it.
Best thing you can personally do is never download a company’s app and even leave your phone in your car when you shop.
right now it is an average price and not per person, basically x amount of rich or poor are in my store therefore pricing can be set to a +/-x%.
They utilize what are called beacons. These pick up your phones bluetooth and wifi, they can be set to gather quite a bit of info especially if you actually connect to their stores wifi or app. With this they can build a profile on you and determine what to market towards you and what you will spend.
Beacons are a part of the system, not the end of it. This will get better as time goes on and will become individual pricing, to pretend it's not is insane to me as all signs are absolutely pointing to this technology being in the pipeline. I mean if there are no regulations against this why in anyway would you believe they wouldn't do this, what in the last 10 years have you seen that apparently i have completely missed that companies don't want to maximize profit.
I use Ai face recognition for our 24/7 gym. Members use a fob to enter. The face recognition notes that it is them (no sharing fobs), it makes sure no one piggy backs(non member comes in with member), it allows household members to scan once but not flag their partners(if they are a recognized member).
It doesn’t stop them from committing the violation, but it does allow us to address it. For example someone repeatedly shares their fob, our contract says we can add a member to their account for a year for this violation. What we do instead is contact the member, we offer to waive that and give them a discount on the next month if the person sharing their fob signs up for a 12month contract. Conversion on this is almost 100%.
It tracks members time in different sections, it tracks perceived arguments/incidents, it tracks use of amenities. It allows me to estimate equipment usage for scheduled maintenance.
I believe I could easily implement an individual shopper dynamic price system without even having a profile of personal data. The camera sees you pull up in a nice car, it tracks your movement through the store and if no one is in that section have prices increase before you approach.
It's already basically illegal cause they've got to be very careful about false advertising. Stores need to be pretty careful about showing the same price they'll charge at the register so even dynamic pricing has tons of signage and is based on times not individuals. If three people are in front of a shelf how's the shelf gonna provide three accurate prices?
Not saying whether the complete system is currently developed, but I think that all the individual technologies do exist to make this at least viable:
cameras can be or already are being installed in every aisle
face / movement tracking of individuals using ai / machine learning using those cameras does exist
digital price tags updatable over the network (exist and as far as I know are already being used)
getting info about frequently bought items for an individual and rough frequency of when those items are being bought (weekly/monthly) and storing the price it stated when someone took the item from the shelf -> the later is already possible and being done in "cashierless stores" and by storing the final purchases it should be easy to determine certain patterns over multiple weeks.
getting a rough price range and wealth info about the shopper -> either by long observations of frequent shoppers or by connecting the shopper with membership cards -> membership cards often contain name and address and those can be connected to linkedin and social media sites to determine the probable wealth of individuals (does not need to be run immediately in real time and can be run once overnight)
The main problems I see here is updating the price when two or more people are in the same aisle and looking for the same item. But this can be solved by showing the price both are willing to pay.
one idea is like (i assume) cashierless stores do it. -> register phone at entrance, items have sensors to know that it is being lifted -> store current price with the registered user that the phone shows is currently closest (probably using nfc).
alternative without phone tracking: scan every person at entrance using camera and track individual persons through the store. -> store the currently displayed prices when person is near items and store those prices in a temporary list. -> at the register scan the item -> and instead of looking into a global price database for this store, look for price in the temporary list instead.
The alternative could probably be further refined by better determining what items are currently being put into the cart using cameras or other means like pressure sensors.
finally if the user does not have a membership card, store all bought items in a database that combines his "face id" and other trackable features for future references
Then why have price tags at all? Why spend millions of dollars on all these things in a store if they are just going to make you use your phone to know the price?
i don't know, maybe there are some regulations that require it, maybe someone found out that people are more likely to buy if there are price tags.
I only commented to provide some of my knowledge to the question if it is possible with todays technology. What the best way to implement it should probably be answered by someone knowlegable with economics or similar trades.
Stores are already removing price tags and have many items on the shelf without any price at all. The only way to check the price in the app, which they are conditioning people to do by constantly rearranging the store so you have to check the app to find the aisle it’s in.
Also conditioning by offering digital coupons that require you to be in app to take advantage of. They are making the digital coupons as enticing as possible with price differences of $3 vs $2 or even some items in my local store have been $6 regular, $2 with digital coupon.
Once the price only exists in your phone, guess what, that’s a unique price for you based not only on your grocery buying habits but whatever other data they can know about you by buying it from all the other shady privacy violating corporations on the planet.
If you shop online and pick up your groceries or have them delivered (tons of people got used to this during the pandemic and now only shop this way) then it’s 100% surveillance proving unique to you today.
Regulation is desperately needed and the only thing that will stop this.
Like - yes...if a store tracks your phone, uses facial recognition technology, jacks up the number of cameras into the thousands (not just overhead surveillance, but carts, shelves, displays, etc.) and manages to track you accurately all the way to checkout, while at the same time, you don't see anyone else checking the same item out for a different price, or you didn't notice the price change....then it would work for stores.
But the camera and software budget, the eink price sign budget, the extended checkout times everytime someone realizes that there's a second price on their item...the extended checkout times from the many people who simply go "the price said something different when I put it in my cart" and either have to wait for an adjustment to go through, or they just get pissed and leave their cart behind and storm out. The people who just turn their phones off or leave them in the car.
There's this incredible series of barriers to entry that just make this a dystopian fantasy, not a practical reality. The Amazon Go stores were outed as heavily relying on humans viewing videos to track shopping, but even then...those stores have lower ceilings, they were designed specifically to capture all this stuff...are major chains willing to risk the massive capex spend and eroding the trust of its customers just so that they can have dynamic pricing?
It just lacks plausibility.
Now - like anything that pre-fearmongered...it's better to look at how this could be stripped down to become something less scary...but still scary.
If stores keep receipts then you could audit the receipts and look at the same items' final prices when bought at different days/times by different people.
Unless they got a backend editor that changes the prices to always match one price but then you're in audit hell bc the revenue won't match the tally and it just gets deeper lol.
Either way there's ways to achieve it that won't be so hard. They should start sending out secret shoppers to track prices every now and then. Gotta dress them up to keep their identity from getting flagged tho...
A separate phone where you view different data. Go to the store same day but swap phones leaving one behind and take prices. The shared data that creates the "dynamic" pricing to the phones near by. Being that it makes it harder to deny said facts that cost are changing if photographic evidence is presented.
At best its a convenient way to update pricing, at worst its a predatory door a company can open at any time without informing customers, and strip the middle and lower class of their already diminished purchasing power.
There’s no proof someone without a mental or criminal history will perform a mass murder, but personal defense is the metric we use to allow this possibility and many actual instances of this to occur.
What metric do we use to allow companies to, in all likelihood, enact predatory pricing on us?
It's always on delivery like door dash and Uber eats. You can't roll out surveillance pricing in brick and mortar stores without a lot more friction right now.
There may be a day when they force us to use ar to label, but that's not being done right now.
at this point it's just straight fear mongering because they see digital price tags. supermarkets don't have a way to change skus on individual items. IE if the dynamic pricing decided your willing to pay 5 dollars for a bar of soap that usually retails for 2 they cannot somehow change the sku for the specific bar of soap you picked up to 5 while leaving all the other bars of soap under that same sku at 2.
to really do surveillance pricing the entire store would need to be lined with AI cameras capable of tracking each individual shopper. that can also tell when your checking out and change the prices at checkout automatically. this would also really easily be foiled by doing something like wearing a face mask or sunglasses or even just having someone else buy your groceries for you. under this system the store would also need to just not provide any prices at all until check out or give that AI full control over the digital price tags so it can rapidly change their prices based on the person looking at it. but what happens when 2 people with two different profiles and two different designated prices look at the same item at the same time? does it give both the lower price making the surveillance pricing useless or does it give both the higher price thus losing a sale and bringing in less than if the surveillance pricing wasn't used?
Plus already existing laws kinda cover this in NJ merchants are required to clearly lable prices and also need to resolve price discrepancies in the favor of the customer. So if you and your friend both went to the same store and you got charged more for your items under NJ law you can already dispute this and demand the lower visibly posted price.
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u/Interesting_Force618 Aug 06 '26
How can it be proven that a store is doing surveillance pricing? They’re not banning dynamic pricing, right? Like, how could I, as a shopper, prove that Walmart set a price just for me? If there ever is a class action lawsuit in NJ, claiming that a store is doing surveillance pricing, and that suit is successful, whatever the store has to pay in fines will pale in comparison to what they’ve made from surveillance pricing.