~~Dynamic pricing~~ Price gouging. FTFY.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Please make it stop
Then I won't be going to that supermarket.
and then there will be a really popular AI driven phone app that you will use to scan items and find out if you're being ripped off or not
Fuckin called it - megacorporations are not to be trusted with digital freedom.
In other news, shoplifting is inexplicably on the rise in shops featuring dynamic pricing.....
We can't compete against these internet stores. People just don't respect brick and mortar and buying locally anymore /s
Should be against the law to change the price after the shop opens at something like a grocery store. Nobody should be able to shop anywhere where the price you pick it up at can change by the time you get to the checkout.
Edit: Maybe there could be some exception for mid day price changes if you emptied the entire store of customers first, but enforcing something like that seems difficult.
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.
Haggling might be fine but they have to honor price tags.
If I'm in a grocery store and I see $1.00 they can't change it and try to charge me $1.10, and when I object and say it was $1.00 it shows $1.10 now.
Well... In Germany apparently they can.
The price tag is not binding, it is a mere price suggestion. The final price is the one when you actually buy it at the checkout.
This is why american taxes had me confused when over there.. it says $1.00 on the pricetag, so how can they tell me a different price at the register??
In Germany the price is actually set at the cashier, not the tag. I found that out the hard way once, where the price tag was wrong and I had to pay more.
So dynamic pricing wouldn't even require deploying these smart tags, the cashier or the 'smart' self-checkout could just do it on their own. They could just use their cameras, analyze your face to figure out if you are in a hurry or not, or in any other way willing to accept a higher price and then offer you the ware to something you are probably going to accept.
The future is realtime individualized price gouging.
It's illegal in Germany, but not in the way you think.
It's illegal to write to wrong price on the sign on purpose, but if it happens by accident the shop is not obligated to sell at the price on the sign.
That's it. You is blowing this way out of proportion.
In Australia if the price at the checkout is higher than the price tag you are entitled to the first item free and subsequent items at the tag price.
So this dynamic pricing bullshit is even more bullshit.
In Australia if the price at the checkout is higher than the price tag you are entitled to the first item free
Got a source on that? That's not what the ACCC says.
My experience is they give it to you for ticket price and then immediately go and take away the incorrect ticket before someone else does the same. (Otherwise this would be false advertising and ACCC will fine them)
How is that not illegal in Germany? This has to fall under some anti-discrimination law
It's illegal, but not in the way you think.
It's illegal to write to wrong price on the sign on purpose, but if it happens by accident the shop is not obligated to sell at the price on the sign.
That's it. OP is blowing this way out of proportion.
Haggling is legal in Germany. The cashier is making the offer.
Wherever it is discrimination or not would probably depend on the metrics used to decide the price.
If someone is really desperate for an article, then I could imagine that the cashier can raise the price.
But I am not a lawer. This is just my assumptions on how it could be implemented.
Haggling makes sense for transactions revolving around used cars, bulk goods and the like. A grocery store is a completely different setting. Everyone expects that they're getting the same deal for a given location. Kind of feels too close to what is legally considered fraud to be feasible.
I'm not sure there is a difference between those things in the German law.
As I said, in Germany the price tag is a mere price suggestion, the final offer and transaction happens on checkout.
In my case it was an electronic article, where the price tag showed a much lower price and the cashier then demanded much more. But it turned out that they can do that.
Ghettotax for individuals everywhere incoming...
Time to vote with our wallets. I absolutely will refuse to shop at any store in my area that starts implementing this.
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.
I completely agree. Best case scenario I hope this becomes illegal, however if not then I still would never shop somewhere with this sort of scummy tactic.
They already do this in Korea. I don't know if they are actually changing prices moment-to-moment, but they are using e-ink price tags that are impossible to distinguish from their printed, paper brethren. I saw one glitch out one day, and that was the only way I could tell. I mean, I guess I might be able to tell if I hunched down and inspected one closely, but it seriously looked identical to the same old printed ones at a glance.
Let’s call it what it is: price discrimination.
Dynamic sounds way more fun!
They already do that, just not as frequently. They change price tags of items every day by hand
Right? This isn't a question of if, more like how often
And if they do it on an individual basis.
Like do they detect that a shopper is in a hurry, or if they just need one more ingredient for their cake so they are willing to pay more.
In Poland it's already there in stores owned by the German Schwarz-Gruppe - Lidl and Kaufland. One might want to start shopping local to get exposed to 100% free range organic greed instead of lab-optimized greed at big stores.
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It’s going to be hilarious when these get hacked
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.
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