Reminder that by law, if the price is listed wrong:

Sometimes the price of an item in store or online at the checkout may not match the displayed or advertised price in store or online. If this happens, even by mistake, the business must either:

• sell the product for the lowest price - either the checkout price, or displayed or advertised price, or
• stop selling the item until the incorrect price is corrected.

Especially if you work there.

Dynamic sounds way more fun!

We've had them for quite some time. They don't change price for individual customers, I don't think they change the price in the middle of the day either. But, I guess, they can change the prices just before opening, like if the wether service forecasts a rainy day they could rise the price of umbrellas and raincoats. Cold? Hot chocolate and soups. Hot? Ice cream and cold drinks. Certain asshole died overnight? Champaign and confetti cannons through the roof. And so on...

That's the personalized prices. That's step two.

This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.

OP was making a lot of shit up.

It doesn’t even have to be per person. It can just be by time of day.

I can imagine price stickers would update daily, and individual users would get personalized discounts on their app.

App-less buyers would pay the baseline price in the sticker, app users would pay less. Like existing loyalty card programs, but with more data collection

Is it really dynamic if the price is always "free"?

Its much easier than you'd think.

I don't know what you're talking about, I'm obviously not gonna steal anything. Sure, accidents happen from time to time. The supermarket decided to replace their cashiers with self checkout operated by random non-employees, after all. If I happen to ring up filet mignon as a Roma tomato, I think that's just the inevitable result of outsourcing your labor to untrained civilians with no incentive to accurately do the job .

We can't compete against these internet stores. People just don't respect brick and mortar and buying locally anymore /s

Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/

Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.

The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”

slavery is legal in jails (in the US)

This is Australia and I think 90% of grocery shops are either this one or the competitor

My local Woolies has had e-ink tags for at least two years, maybe more. Between this and Coles hiring Palantir, we mostly shop at Aldi. Bunnings and Kmart using facial recognition as if it's no biggie as well. How long until they partner with CBA to check your credit card limit as you stand in front of the bananas to see how much you'll pay?

Issue is that haggling is actually legal in many countries.

So at the cashier they will make you an offer, which, if you pay, accept.

Now with technical support making individual offers becomes pretty easy and effordless on their end, but if you are in a hurry you don't have that technical support to make a counter offer that effordless... So the shopper is at an disadvantage. Either way, your reaction, wherever you buy or not will train the AI of the store to extract the maximum amount of money of the broad customer base. If some people are priced out of living, they probably don't care.

They do that anyway, but usually prices going down.

e.g. yellow stickers going on things that will expire soon.

You've not lived if you haven't watched two pensioners fight to the death over a 20p pack of Greek yoghurt.

Sure... If you even notice it. And if enough people will care and if there are still stores around that don't do that, clearly superior profit maximising scheme.

I'd rather want this stuff to become illegal. So calling your representatives, make news and go to the streets about this would I think help more that yet another boycott.

Or be like me where we have two Coles over the road from each other and a woolworths 5 minutes down the road and that's about it beyond corner stores that are only there surviving off the sale of alcohol to itinerants who get refused service at big name bottlos

I already have a browser plugin that tells me the price history of everything at Coles. There's one for Woolies too.

Sigh, no you don't need a fucking AI app to do that.

And you ARE being ripped off if you are dealing with a corporation, whether it's the price, the quality, the quantity, the fine text, ect. You are getting fucked every single time.

So please don't be holding up the line and blocking aisles while your chatbot nanny tells tells you that everything in FUCK-YOU-LOL-MART™ is overpriced. Learn how underscan and shotplift like a normal person.

Not quite the same thing, but I used an LLM to cobble together a HTML file that allows me to search for products on Coles, Woolies, Aldi and Amazon at the same time in the same window (via frames and a Firefox extension to get around some security settings).

Works a treat when planning our big shops for the week, and has already saved us hundreds of dollars since Jan.

Firmware on these is pretty tight. They're usually using CC2510s or CC2530s. The CC2510 has a voltage glitch hack that you can use to attempt to read the contents via the DCOUPL capcitor, but it's not very effective and you can only read a few bytes per attack.

You can see a github some tools some have created here. Eventually someone is going to read the firmware off theses and be able to hack them, it's just a matter of time.

If they got batteries

I want them batteries

It's weird, the higher the prices get, the worse my memory and aptitude with self service checkouts gets.

Don't you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?

This is what I came to the comments to gripe about this whole thing. Yes, they can play some games and probably will, but consider: People will be watching. They do this and you bet people will track this crap and post about it. The blowback will be huge.

If they're stupid enough to try this, it will not last. lol. You can raise prices over the long term, but fuck around with short term prices people can see changing for no good reason? Yeah.....

And on the "personal pricing" - that's written by someone that doesn't understand how barcodes work.

But I'm sure they will try to play some games with it.

The solution of which is that you change the tag before you change the actual price if it's an increase, and the price before the tag if it's a discount, with a long enough delay. That's what they do with gas pumps and the advertisements here in Finland.

“It was $2.99 when I picked it up.”

Watch a product for a minutes, clock the lowest it displays in that time, run in and grab it, “It was $2.99.”

Repeat for all 30 items in your cart just to annoy the store.

It might not be legal, but it's already morally acceptable to shoplift from Coles and Woolworths

I just don't because it would be a massive pain if I were to be caught