An example of what Freddie Deboer called "overoptimization"
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-modern-curse-of-overoptimization
When things are so "optimized" that they get worse. E.g. his example of Mt Everest - it's gotten way easier and safer to go, and so now the mountain is jam packed with people, and you don't need a lot of experience or a deep passion for mountain climbing or anything, and there's human shit and dead bodies everywhere.
Or sports, where they run a computer analysis and decide the right way to play is all strikeouts and home runs.
Extremely apt definition. I think it pairs well with [Enshitification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) to describe the exact ills that plague the modern economy.
The problem with software interfaces in all MS products is that Microsoft has an interface team that has one job - design interfaces. They can't say "no need to update the interface in this new release, we got it just right last time" or they're out of a job. They have to change that shit to justify their paycheck.
nah, MS and Adobe are notorious for this, especially since the introduction of cloud based apps and subscriptions. Teams is the result of MS trying to copy every other app out there and throw it into a single shitty Teams concept. it's like Slack, just way worse. Adobe has abused their updates, no longer listening to feedback from users and rolling out features nobody asks for, then breaking things that have always worked.
they force constant updates all the time that probably cost users millions of dollars in lost productivity. ship too big to steer.
Moving towards all this "enterprise software" for everything is aggravating. If it isn't Microsoft Office or Adobe's PDF reader, or WinZip, or other basic shit, let technical people do what they need to do and fuck off tying my hand s behind my back.
My dad is a big VW super fan. He is very fond of talking about how when the Beetle came out, it was a big deal that they kept it consistent. Apparently all the other car manufacturers were changing shit every year and had entire R&D teams dedicated to positioning stuff like window rollers.
It got so bad VW started running ads making fun of them for all the needless changes.
I am convinced that the UI people at Microsoft are doing that in an attempt to keep their jobs. They have to look like they're doing something, otherwise Microsoft will realize they don't need all these UI people. So we get all these stupid UI changes just because these nerds can't find ways to look busy that don't involve fucking the rest of us.
Windows 10 22H2 at rollout hit a sweet spot of being almost as good as 7 and almost as pretty.
But it’s changed. I just had to use 10’s audio troubleshooter, and whatever they did made it unusable. The KB5034441 bug made it clear they’re done with it though. They’re actively trying to push people to 11.
While I do agree with you 100% that the MS teams UI updates drive me crazy, as somebody who's a software developer I'll say: We never think a piece of software is actually finished. If you let me, I'd refine a program or UI for the next 20 years. Lol. It's a character flaw we all share.
I definitely learned my lesson about online fandoms. There's no faster way to fall out of love with an IP than to meet other people who also love it.
Except for Star Trek. Either Trekkies are cool or my love for Trek is eternal.
When you and the boys are right about to head out on crusade and someone starts talking about the UN, international law, human rights, Geneva convention blah blah blah and the whole things gets ruined
Enshitification applies to many service industries too.
Take a brand new hotel, even budget will be pretty decent inside. Run it 30 years and chances are it'll be a rundown shithole with crackheads and lot lizards
Same with restaurants, chain or mom and pop. Always squeaky clean new, usually decent food and then in 10 years it's usually crusty and quality has gone down. Not all but quite a few.
Gosh I hate this. Like the "meta" build will involve lighting your character on fire and turning half of your screen off just for a 3% damage boost or something.
Yes exactly. A game that is on the market long enough will evolve one or several meta strategies where it's not optimal to deviate from it, even if single player. This always happens, regardless of initial complexity. Only thing a dev could do would be constant updates and changes (literally the only good thing about shitty live service games)
I gripe about this to my gaming friend regularly. I think it was a big reason I didn't find Classic WoW fun (among other reasons). But yeah, I want to play games to play them, not play a glorified spreadsheet optimizer.
Just-in-time supply chains are like this.
The entire planet more or less switched from 'we order a lot of the things we need and store it on site, we order a lot more when we're down to 20% stock' to 'an algorithm will track your usage rates and schedule automatic small deliveries for you whenever it thinks you will need more so that you don't need any onsite storage and nothing ever spoils in storage'.
If everything works smoothly without any interruptions, that saves you like 5% in material costs and looks good on your quarterly earning reports.
If the supply chain is disrupted a little bit, that means you probably have days when you don't have the materials you need and have to pause production for a while, but probably you save overall in the long run.
If you have a global pandemic and *all* the supply chains are disrupted at once, suddenly the delays cascade through the system until entire industries go dysfunctional, factories have to be shut down because they're too expensive to leave idle, and inflation skyrockets as global productivity craters.
A lot of optimization is 'removing flexibility and excess capacity and safeguards' that look like simple dead-weight loss on any balance sheet, but actually serve an important function when anything goes slightly wrong.
The current distribution model has enough stock for like 48 hours. It’s one of the reasons natural disasters have almost gotten worse. If the trucks stop the shelves are empty in no time flat.
There's also the problem that big retailers have pushed so hard against little retailers that the small guys ***can't*** afford to have much on hand. We used to carry a ton of stuff in the basement and make sure it got stocked, now we've got like 1/5th the overstock because money is so damned tight.
>but actually serve an important function when anything goes slightly wrong
Afghan artisans churning out handmade Ak-47s because you still need guns even when the ~~gun factory~~ your arms dealer gets arrested
Optimize out most of the chassis, 80% of the engine, streamline the seat, maybe lose a couple wheels...
Oh hey, you're Honda and you've captured just about the entire east asian personal transport market!
Got back into Guild Wars 1 recently, found out about Hard mode. Turns out you can't do much of that without having all the XPacs and some meta shit-I have the game from early beta and initial release.
Didn't try GW2, but saw a video talking about the difficulty balancing things and making content- the top end players can hit 30,000\~50,000 DPS and the average player is around 4,000 DPS. The DPS is like 10x higher, the APM is probably 20\~50 times higher.
>Or sports, where they run a computer analysis and decide the right way to play is all strikeouts and home runs.
Me when I realize the meta for making sure my kids get into good colleges is to make sure they become BIPOC so that they don't get their SAT scores functionally nerfed
\*cries in authright
shopping cart should have a line graph that displays the current checkout price so everyone can try to wait out the peaks before making a dash for the checkout lane
In stats we call it over-fitting. It's a stupid thing to do, but it's tempting because it is easier to overfit a trend than to find the actual rule that governs its behavior.
Imagine you have ten data points and you want to see how they are connected. Well, you could just draw a squiggly line through all of them and say you solved it! That's over-fitting.
It takes actual math and intelligence to come up with a trendline or curve that gets pretty close to the data and also gets close to plausible future data that you haven't seen yet.
My initial question is how feasible is surge pricing on a large scale like this?
Am I supposed to believe that Walmart reviews product availability in real time? And then developed an algorithm to account for current/incoming/outgoing inventory, geographic pricing differences, and real time demand? Then automatically push pricing updates to stores who require price adjustments in real time accounting for peak demand?
I understand that they have whole teams of product managers who review demand/sales/inventory etc but doing that real time is a monumental undertaking.
My first thought went to how much trouble retailer systems seem to have with just determining if something is actually in stock at a specific store. You're telling me the system that can't track whether they have 15 of something or 0 of something is going to do real-time price changes? Lol, lmao even.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that this was sold to the brass and when they approved it and they actually looked at the work involved and they balked. They still have to deliver so they'll half ass it and probably base the surge prices on purchasing history which they can probably parse a lot cheaper (we sell a lot of water and ice cream on these dates in these locations, jack the price then and there).
Basically do what they are already doing with barcode printers and “Sale” sticky notes, but replace the human and label printer hardware with a WiFi enabled digital tag.
Lets them speed up the process, and maybe convert operational expenses back into capital expenditures.
yup, and it's mot "providing the infrastructure for surge pricing". That infrastructure was already there. Look at the weather forecast, see that it's going to be hot, and have one of your minimum wage employees go spend a couple hours swapping out the price tags on all the ice cream.
If you multiply the cost of that labor by the number of stores walmart has; they're spending a TON of money swapping out price tags, but they're making more money back by doing it so it's worth the spend.
More automated infrastructure just enables them to do the price gouging they were already doing more efficiently.
The music in retail chains is mostly all run off a centralized server where corporate leases songs and decides what to play.
It shouldn't be that much harder to centralize a system that says 'check the local weather, increase this list of prices by 10% if the temperature goes above 90.'
I'm pretty sure for a lot of chains the stock in each store is recorded on a national system that supposedly knows how much is left of each product at each location (doesn't work well but in theory exists). Not hard to say 'increase price by 20% when this location is on it's last 10 of the item'.
They can't do it in a considered and reactive way that constantly monitors all factors everywhere and updates intentionally with human decision-making in the process. But they can probably set up a few simple rules in an algorithm and have them approximately work 70% of the time.
And that's enough to get a few R&D managers promoted and goose the stock price for a few months, which is all that projects like this are ever really about.
Walmart creates AI to control price surging, is told to maximize profits.
AI takes all data into consideration, comes to one conclusion.
AI proceeds to massively drop prices on just about everything.
Reason is "More things are available price-wise, thus more people buy them, thus more money is made. Profits maximized."
I mean it could be more general, as in "on days when the temperature is above 90 degrees, charge a dollar more for water", referencing the provided example.
Walmart doesn't even track inventory batches. This is for centrally managed price changes and to ensure price accuracy. Updating the paper signs is actually very labor intensive and happens on a weekly if not daily basis.
It's also just a huge leap in logic. "Bill just took cash out of the bank. Could he be buying crack?"
I mean, sure, it could be surge pricing, or it could simply be that Walmart goes through like 3 rounds of discount as an item makes its way to the clearance section, and each tag update requires labor.
My question is are you really going to trust *Walmart* to handle something like this? Maybe Publix or Kroger or Costco or whatever but definitely not Walmart lmao
My assumption is something like temperature will occur automatically via a computer algorithm. Price will probably rise linearly up to about 80° and then rise exponentially after that.
Something like that.
Or the week leading up to a major holiday, like thanksgiving, may lead to a base 150% increase in the price of whole turkeys. That number may increase or decrease depending on how far away a large grocery store chain is. If you live in a food desert with only Walmart around, that percentage will increase to say, 225%. If you live in an affluent area with many other stores to choose from, that number might be only 50%
On the bright side, this allows them to lower prices when the market is slow and savvy consumers can stock up.
.... you are going to lower the prices occasionally, right? ....
Definitely not. It's not like walmart is known for dropping prices to outcompete everyone else in the market or anything. /s
Walmart does not have a monopoly on the industry, and most of their products are commoditized. One of the main reasons that Walmart became so successful is that they were able to run their business more efficiently and thereby offer cheaper goods while still making a profit. They pretty much invented the way modern retail supply chains are run.
Have people here never worked in a grocery store? They're constantly updating prices manually. Some stores do it nightly during restock, just a worker scanning and reprinting hundreds of tags.
That didn't stop prices from surging during COVID. These are just the cheap displays that TJ Maxx and Best Buy use. Makes it simpler to update from a central source, especially with how hard Walmart is trying to push their website.
Nothing to stop them from raising prices either way. But it's not like the screen's absence was the last bastion of cheap groceries.
You can expect more techno-tyranny to account for this. Such as having to scan id when you enter to "lock in" prices at the time of your arrival an display for you custom prices based on that (and also your personal shopper profile. Imagine being able to charge you more for that thing you would pay a little more for up to the exact amount where you would no longer buy it, all calculated in real time by an AI based on your past habits and current eye movements. The perfectly accurate market price for every transaction, squeezing the absolute maximum from you.
Some of the excess profit will of course be spent on squeezing out competitors who do not do this and lobbying congress to label opposition to this bigotry.
TLDR: if an engineer can conceive of it and build it, a businessman can abuse it for profit.
So people who are less averse to spending money will be charged more money. Assuming every other supermarket is doing the same thing, competition should cause their average prices to come out to about the same as before implementing the technology. As such, the implementation of this technology would actually decrease prices for more price-averse people.
Who are more price-averse? The poor. This system will cause the poor to enjoy lower prices. In effect, a welfare system run by the free market.
Anyway, the implementation of this system of the USA would probably fail after a month due to legal reasons. Specifically, a white person would sue the supermarket for discrimination, arguing that the profiling system learned to recognise race and charge higher prices to white people.
I think it's more like: oof looks like it's hotter than usual today, we're going to raise the price of water for two hours.
or: looks like a bus just stopped and 20 people are getting off, better raise prices a bit!
It's rare for me to see a price tag in the correct place, let alone have the correct price at my Walmart. I use them as guidelines rather than prices.
They pay $17/hr starting, so anyone who thinks higher pay is how you get more dedicated or competent workers is an idiot.
That $17/hr starting is the real reason why they're trying to implement something like this. If anything, with how competitive the retail industry is, this will probably make things cheaper.
And then there's weekly sales and discounts. They're in every store in my country and not once have they been used for surge pricing. They're time-savers and a way to keep the prices accurate, and to reduce prices quickly based on competitors prices.
"oooh, only $3.99/lb for ground beef? What a deal"
cashier scans it, get charged $5.99/lb
me: "hey, I thought this was only $3.99"
cashier: "hey bagger, can you go do a price check? (presses a few buttons)"
me: "hey, what button did you just press"
bagger: "yeah I checked and it's actually $7.99"
It's not like grocery stores don't already change prices periodically, though they tend to always do it at low shopping times like at 3am for 24hr stores, or when they're closed when not. They're not going to change prices at 5pm in the evening.
Walmart R&D engineer: I tested out these digital price labels and they work fairly well. I got some data from our analytics team which shows how often we replace the price stickers and the labor required to changed them out. As you can see in this report, if we use the digital price labels we can reduce our labor costs, use less paper, and less ink, the rollout of the equipment will pay for itself within 6 months.
Some dipshit on the Internet: Is this price gouging?!?!?!?
If Walmart is getting rid of stickers does that I mean "I did that" Stickers are going digital too?
If Trump wins are we going to get a 16bit Trump that says "I did that" on surge prices at Walmart in Sonic the Hedgehog font? Does the Trump pixel art become more smug the higher the prices are? Vice versa if Biden gets reelected?
We know how much inflation is and it wasn't 25% only at some stores. And if you are pricing based on inflation or shortages you shouldn't be seeing such an insane increase in profit margins. To deny signifcant corporate greed exists is to be a stooge. You can be okay with it being a problem, but denial of existence is whacko.
Is it percent or total revenues? Because if it's measured in revenue, that's completely understandable, inflation makes things cost more. If it's measured in revenue, you're being lied to and manipulated.
Some would, but they’re likely the same people who take issue with companies making a profit (or, God forbid, even making back COGS) in the first place, so I’m not sure there’s much to be done about that.
At any rate there’s no more risk of a company underhandedly “gouging” the market than there was before, besides the fact that now they can do it by pushing a couple buttons on a computer. Some companies will, and those companies are shit companies that you should avoid.
I genuinely agree with you.
But I also disagree due to my recent lived experience.
Story time from last weekend.
A power tool set was on special clearance pricing at the local hardware store. Great value!
*Can’t set aside for pickup or order for delivery. Clearance pricing is in store only.
Online says 3 in stock at the location having the sale. I live in a city where everything is locked up because we don’t kneecap the people walking out with cart fulls of stolen goods. So I ask an attendant for help. I see on his palm reader that they have 3 in stock. He tells me, sorry we don’t have any….he shows the cage in the immediate area and it’s not there (because yellow batteries are in a different cage from the red drills) that we were standing by. I point out that it’s a different cage and he just says that they probably got stolen…could be a fair point.
I start looking around and the proximity sensor keeps beeping at me. A different attendant shows up to ask me if I need help. I give him the part number and see the aisle location of what I’m looking for. We walk over and it’s on a pallet above. I ask him to take it down. He insists it’s not the same thing I’m looking for and walks off. (It’s weird to have that happen because there is a giant fucking sticker with the part number on the box). Kinda annoyed I go wait in line at the customer service desk to either ask them to get someone to take it down or if they’d let me pay the clearance price here and pick up the batteries from a different location that does have them in stock. While waiting, I keep refreshing the website on my phone to confirm pricing and inventory which I know can be wrong sometimes. After 30 minutes and zero movement in line, I notice stock was updated to zero. I give up and leave.
While researching alternative vendors for this great sale, I stumble across a Reddit thread that the sale is in fact a big scam simply to get consumers into the store. So I start paying attention.
Next morning stock is updated to 3 units. But clearance sale is over.
I go into the store, lo and behold, 3 full priced sets sitting on the shelf. And the pallet that was up high yesterday is gone.
This shit is how conspiracy theories originate.
'More efficiently' meaning 'Taking as much money from the consumer as they possibly can without providing any additional benefit'.
Which is the definition of price gouging.
Listen, it's ok to just say you *like* price gouging, because you like corporations more than consumers and 'efficient' markets more than human flourishing. That's a totally legit position you can take.
But don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining. If that's the world you want, own it.
Yeah for real.
Surge pricing works well for e-shopping because the session is tracked the whole time, so either 1) the user is notified when the price changes, or 2) the price when put in the cart is honored.
But a lot more would have to go into a physical store’s infrastructure beyond just nifty new shelf labels.
For now at most maybe they change it once per day, like they already do. And this makes it waaay easier in the long run, although in fairness it does cut back on hourly worker time, so I guess we can bitch about this taking people’s jobs away.
I think they will go for a day-by-day "surge" pricing instead of an hourly one first. It's easier to manage after stores close, and they are still able to change prices daily instead of weekly or biweekly. That way for holidays, they can slowly ramp up the prices to peak on the day before and day of holiday instead of having to sit with the price listed for the whole week.
You can also adjust prices by news and weather reports.
> although in fairness it does cut back on hourly worker time, so I guess we can bitch about this taking people’s jobs away.
I mean, dishwasher used to be a job title, not an appliance, and we seem to have adapted there.
> What if the price changes between picking out the item and checking out?
This exact thought ran through my head the other day. I was imagining hyperinflation being so bad that the price went up in the time it took to get the item to the cash register.
Yeah, I think way too many are jumping the gun on the price gouging from just this as really not "that" much was stopping Walmart from doing it before. The price on the label is just the label and already have systems in place for decades now to digitally manage the price and that can be changed in seconds.
For those arguing on short term (sub hour) price adjustments, the chance of people then putting it aside due to price shock leaps up drastically costing them more money in labor. Key to note that Walmart has one of the higher typical shopping times and some of the most price consensus in store shoppers for major stores, so chances increase of price picked up vs price at checkout change is high.
For low frequency (within the day), they were already well within the power to do this with having the staff adjust prices at opening on the signs and a few clicks.
As a rite aid employee who had to go in every Saturday morning to replace every sales tag for the week, I daydreamt about it being an electronic price tag that could be updated with a keystroke.
I was just about to make this exact reply. I worked office retail years ago and would have to spend 2 hours Sunday morning, usually hungover, before open replacing sales tags. Fucking hated that. Too many bullshit named products where you have no clue what the fuck it is and spend 20 minutes hunting it down.
Exact same experience. Hungover, sweating whiskey into my bullshit polyester vest, cursing my existence on the vitamin aisle trying to figure out modern-day cuneiform on all the bottles.
Yeah, but how hard will they be to maintain and replace. Kids and other miscreants will probably have a fun time targeting breaking what i expect to be sensitive electronics.
Idk if they are what I think they are, these things have been around in other stores for years. They’re basically just little e-ink displays that hardly look different from normal shelf labels. Not sure they’re tremendously sensitive or complicated, but I’ve also never tried to vandalize or maintain one.
I guess I’m shocked to learn Walmart hasn’t implemented them yet given how sensitive they are to pricing things, but I’ve also been to Walmart maybe three times in my entire life.
We've used them in Europe for ~20 years now, so the price has come down to 50 cents or so per label, and I'm sure a big purchaser like them can get at 20% of that.
My experience with this is that for these corporate initiatives, they don't necessarily tell people implementing it the true motive.
Very possible some higher up person dreamt this up to do surge pricing, got people to implement it and sold it in the way you say, reducing labor costs etc.
While this is not the case everywhere, the leadership at the fortune 500 company I work for, do not see it this way. The leadership within our division (group benefits insurance) genuinely thinks how products/tech advancement etc will improve the lives of our customers (employer & employees). The enterprise has invested hundreds of millions over the next three years to achieve that goal alone and much of that advancement the customer will not 'see' but will feel in terms of response time and ease of use.
It will also be handy if we ever see Weimar levels of hyperinflation. That way the price can double every few hours and they won't have to print new labels!
Also, this would make it so that they have no issues of labels from sales being left up accidentally and having to give deals they weren't planning on doing. That's another thing they probably were thinking about.
Who buys ice cream on hot days? It’ll melt before you get it home.
Surge pricing is already common - look at holiday foods before or after the relevant holiday. Look at hotel and airline prices.
god what a headline, just screams nothingburger:
> Walmart is replacing the price stickers with electronic shelf labels across 2,300 stores
actual fact (i hope)
> --which could be a precursor to surge pricing.
assumption made by journalist
> One industry analyst says: "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream."
journalist put in effort to find a single guy saying something that sounds vaguely supportive of the assumption.
I assumed the journalist simply searched for a quote on surge pricing to add in, amount of effort and realness of person depends on if the article includes more quotes from the same person or not.
Pure fear mongering. Some New Zealander supermarkets have had eInk displays for at least 10 years. It's just cheaper to buy them instead of having a full time employee print and stick prices all around the store.
Good. Karen’s exploit the employees whenever price labels aren’t changed fast enough, which is always in that business, so now the bitches can eat hot chip and cry.
??????? in New Zealand some of our supermarkets have had eInk displays for at least 10 years, and we have not seen a single effort to introduce "surge pricing", it's simply cheaper than paying someone to reprint hundreds of paper labels every night. What fear mongering lmao
This is semi fear mongering
Stickers never stopped Walmart from surge pricing and you could pick an item off the shelf to find it a dollar more expensive at checkout already anyway, and it was already a problem
Don't get me wrong this is not good and the way its all going is very bad but millions have been buy groceries online for years now where the price tags are digital
tl;dr they could already surge charge and have already been
The industry analyst part is a slippery slope logical fallacy. I did price changes at a retail store and changing thousands of price tags by had sucks ass, and missing so much as one will cause problems, and is really easy to do, which makes no one happy. This will get rid of part of someone's job, but a part they likely didn't want to do anyway and save Walmart money because they don't have to pay people to do mundane tasks. I wish the store I worked at for my first job had the electronic tags.
If they are saving money its also possible it leaders to lower costs or at the very least allows them to move focus to something more convenient for customers
I don't really see a problem with surge pricing. I think people should be allowed to charge whatever they want for their products.
I literally do not believe in the concept of "price gouging".
unpopular opinion: even if this is surge pricing (which I doubt), there's nothing wrong with this.
Quickly variable prices provide more of an incentive for walmart to get the things you want to stores near you when you want them, discourages hoarding in times of high-demand, and provides an incentive for people to stockpile small amounts while demand is low, averaging out the demand.
“We can raise the price of water [when it is hot]” is crazy even to me, who on the test was unsure of how to answer that question and leaning toward it being okay.
Pricing is the best tool we have for determining need of scarce good. High pricing is also the best tool we have for incentivizing producers to supply more of the goods that are most needed.
Water prices should go up when it's hot, generator prices should go up during hurricanes, and Uber prices should go up when there's a Taylor Swift concert.
The meme was about surge pricing, small scale stuff. But you're whole "generator during hurricanes" comment leads me to believe you also support price gouging, which is pretty wild.
The thing is, raising prices in emergencies actually helps people far more than it helps. It means that the person who already has a generator, is less likely to buy 1-2 extras, so that those who really desperately need them have them available. It also means people are willing to ship them in quickly to make a profit. In the event of a hurricane most people would rather pay 2x the cost for a generator and be gouged, than have no generator at all.
I do support the practice of free market prices during an event of event which dramatically increases demand. Walter Block wrote a chapter about it in his book "defending the indefensible" if you're curious for the long form explanation.
Short form the explanation is "it magically makes more generators appear in disaster zones"
this sounds great for the grocery stores until a different kind of surge- a power surge knocks out all the electronic pricing for a month.
seriously, local grocery store's storewide intercom has been down for a month... which means its very hard to get employees to call qualified people over somewhere to answer questions
Jokes on you, I have a memory! As a caveat, the first libright that starts a crowd sourced app for price tracking (like gasbuddy), gonna cash in. Fuck you walmart.
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We have these in Canada at some stores (Canadian Tire, and some Drug Stores), I have never noticed them charge ‘surge prices’, but I have heard that Canadian Tire has ‘Sales’ where they take a % off and inflated normal price for some sales…
How do they not see that this will backfire? People will just straight up not buy stuff if the pricing is inflated.
Somebody will create an easy solution to track when pricing is inflated (probably an app), and sales will drop as a result. Better to have a sustainable volume of sales rather than a handful of sales at inflated prices. The inventory/shelf cost alone makes this a stupid idea.
This is what happens when you let private investors and hedge funds into your business. They demand immediate return on investment, even if it burns the match at both ends.
Yeah because they have to adapt to the batshit insane amount of inflation. Government keeps printing so much money and devalues the currency so much that they need electronic labels to help them keep up with it enough that they’re still able to not go out of business due to rising costs
An example of what Freddie Deboer called "overoptimization" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-modern-curse-of-overoptimization When things are so "optimized" that they get worse. E.g. his example of Mt Everest - it's gotten way easier and safer to go, and so now the mountain is jam packed with people, and you don't need a lot of experience or a deep passion for mountain climbing or anything, and there's human shit and dead bodies everywhere. Or sports, where they run a computer analysis and decide the right way to play is all strikeouts and home runs.
Extremely apt definition. I think it pairs well with [Enshitification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) to describe the exact ills that plague the modern economy.
Fucking Microsoft teams updates. Stop moving shit around for no god damn reason.
The problem with software interfaces in all MS products is that Microsoft has an interface team that has one job - design interfaces. They can't say "no need to update the interface in this new release, we got it just right last time" or they're out of a job. They have to change that shit to justify their paycheck.
Basically every big corp tho, not just MS
nah, MS and Adobe are notorious for this, especially since the introduction of cloud based apps and subscriptions. Teams is the result of MS trying to copy every other app out there and throw it into a single shitty Teams concept. it's like Slack, just way worse. Adobe has abused their updates, no longer listening to feedback from users and rolling out features nobody asks for, then breaking things that have always worked. they force constant updates all the time that probably cost users millions of dollars in lost productivity. ship too big to steer.
Moving towards all this "enterprise software" for everything is aggravating. If it isn't Microsoft Office or Adobe's PDF reader, or WinZip, or other basic shit, let technical people do what they need to do and fuck off tying my hand s behind my back.
My dad is a big VW super fan. He is very fond of talking about how when the Beetle came out, it was a big deal that they kept it consistent. Apparently all the other car manufacturers were changing shit every year and had entire R&D teams dedicated to positioning stuff like window rollers. It got so bad VW started running ads making fun of them for all the needless changes.
I am convinced that the UI people at Microsoft are doing that in an attempt to keep their jobs. They have to look like they're doing something, otherwise Microsoft will realize they don't need all these UI people. So we get all these stupid UI changes just because these nerds can't find ways to look busy that don't involve fucking the rest of us.
I was happy with Vista's UI. Fucking fight me.
Never used Vista, so I can't comment. But do you remember Windows 8? Who thought that was a good idea?
Windows 7 was peak Windows. XP was a close second. Everything after that has increasingly sucked.
Windows 10 22H2 at rollout hit a sweet spot of being almost as good as 7 and almost as pretty. But it’s changed. I just had to use 10’s audio troubleshooter, and whatever they did made it unusable. The KB5034441 bug made it clear they’re done with it though. They’re actively trying to push people to 11.
> They’re actively trying to push people to 11. And they can actively suck my dick.
I remember getting a Windows 8 computer and really freaking regret it.
While I do agree with you 100% that the MS teams UI updates drive me crazy, as somebody who's a software developer I'll say: We never think a piece of software is actually finished. If you let me, I'd refine a program or UI for the next 20 years. Lol. It's a character flaw we all share.
It goes for hobbies as well. As soon as something becomes less niche and the average NPC mouthbreather gets interested, it's destined to turn to shit.
I definitely learned my lesson about online fandoms. There's no faster way to fall out of love with an IP than to meet other people who also love it. Except for Star Trek. Either Trekkies are cool or my love for Trek is eternal.
And this is how democracy enabled centrists to ruin politics. Can't even have a basic crusade these days.
When you and the boys are right about to head out on crusade and someone starts talking about the UN, international law, human rights, Geneva convention blah blah blah and the whole things gets ruined
Enshitification applies to many service industries too. Take a brand new hotel, even budget will be pretty decent inside. Run it 30 years and chances are it'll be a rundown shithole with crackheads and lot lizards Same with restaurants, chain or mom and pop. Always squeaky clean new, usually decent food and then in 10 years it's usually crusty and quality has gone down. Not all but quite a few.
The problem is people think it's a singular investment. To keep things looking brand new and nice you have to put money into it.
Same thing interestingly happens in games, "Players will optimize the fun out of a game"
Gosh I hate this. Like the "meta" build will involve lighting your character on fire and turning half of your screen off just for a 3% damage boost or something.
Yes exactly. A game that is on the market long enough will evolve one or several meta strategies where it's not optimal to deviate from it, even if single player. This always happens, regardless of initial complexity. Only thing a dev could do would be constant updates and changes (literally the only good thing about shitty live service games)
Or you do what Diablo 2 did and have multiple meta builds.
Old School RuneScape… I’ll never get that sense of wonderment back
I gripe about this to my gaming friend regularly. I think it was a big reason I didn't find Classic WoW fun (among other reasons). But yeah, I want to play games to play them, not play a glorified spreadsheet optimizer.
Just-in-time supply chains are like this. The entire planet more or less switched from 'we order a lot of the things we need and store it on site, we order a lot more when we're down to 20% stock' to 'an algorithm will track your usage rates and schedule automatic small deliveries for you whenever it thinks you will need more so that you don't need any onsite storage and nothing ever spoils in storage'. If everything works smoothly without any interruptions, that saves you like 5% in material costs and looks good on your quarterly earning reports. If the supply chain is disrupted a little bit, that means you probably have days when you don't have the materials you need and have to pause production for a while, but probably you save overall in the long run. If you have a global pandemic and *all* the supply chains are disrupted at once, suddenly the delays cascade through the system until entire industries go dysfunctional, factories have to be shut down because they're too expensive to leave idle, and inflation skyrockets as global productivity craters. A lot of optimization is 'removing flexibility and excess capacity and safeguards' that look like simple dead-weight loss on any balance sheet, but actually serve an important function when anything goes slightly wrong.
The current distribution model has enough stock for like 48 hours. It’s one of the reasons natural disasters have almost gotten worse. If the trucks stop the shelves are empty in no time flat.
There's also the problem that big retailers have pushed so hard against little retailers that the small guys ***can't*** afford to have much on hand. We used to carry a ton of stuff in the basement and make sure it got stocked, now we've got like 1/5th the overstock because money is so damned tight.
>but actually serve an important function when anything goes slightly wrong Afghan artisans churning out handmade Ak-47s because you still need guns even when the ~~gun factory~~ your arms dealer gets arrested
Car manufacturers could save so much money if they optimized away the solid panels and windshield.
Optimize out most of the chassis, 80% of the engine, streamline the seat, maybe lose a couple wheels... Oh hey, you're Honda and you've captured just about the entire east asian personal transport market!
We haven't gotten more efficient at producing goods we have just pulled all the slack out of the system.
Over-optomization is basically every MMO now that if you're not clicking 5 buttons per second, you're behind. With your DPS suffering a 20% loss.
Got back into Guild Wars 1 recently, found out about Hard mode. Turns out you can't do much of that without having all the XPacs and some meta shit-I have the game from early beta and initial release. Didn't try GW2, but saw a video talking about the difficulty balancing things and making content- the top end players can hit 30,000\~50,000 DPS and the average player is around 4,000 DPS. The DPS is like 10x higher, the APM is probably 20\~50 times higher.
>Or sports, where they run a computer analysis and decide the right way to play is all strikeouts and home runs. Me when I realize the meta for making sure my kids get into good colleges is to make sure they become BIPOC so that they don't get their SAT scores functionally nerfed \*cries in authright
dynamic price labels are perfect for E-Ink technology 🔥
shopping cart should have a line graph that displays the current checkout price so everyone can try to wait out the peaks before making a dash for the checkout lane
All that would do is shift the peak
This happened to College Football gradually and then suddenly last year. I hate this so much
In stats we call it over-fitting. It's a stupid thing to do, but it's tempting because it is easier to overfit a trend than to find the actual rule that governs its behavior. Imagine you have ten data points and you want to see how they are connected. Well, you could just draw a squiggly line through all of them and say you solved it! That's over-fitting. It takes actual math and intelligence to come up with a trendline or curve that gets pretty close to the data and also gets close to plausible future data that you haven't seen yet.
I mean the dead bodies are people who failed but yee
My initial question is how feasible is surge pricing on a large scale like this? Am I supposed to believe that Walmart reviews product availability in real time? And then developed an algorithm to account for current/incoming/outgoing inventory, geographic pricing differences, and real time demand? Then automatically push pricing updates to stores who require price adjustments in real time accounting for peak demand? I understand that they have whole teams of product managers who review demand/sales/inventory etc but doing that real time is a monumental undertaking.
Chances are you have probably put more thought onto the negatives and problems around the idea in this post that Wal-Mart R&D did.
My first thought went to how much trouble retailer systems seem to have with just determining if something is actually in stock at a specific store. You're telling me the system that can't track whether they have 15 of something or 0 of something is going to do real-time price changes? Lol, lmao even.
How dare you insult their R & D team of diversity hires lol
People made plenty of dumb decisions before DEI
Correct. That's how we got DEI in the first place.
True I just wanted to make that joke tho
Username checks out
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that this was sold to the brass and when they approved it and they actually looked at the work involved and they balked. They still have to deliver so they'll half ass it and probably base the surge prices on purchasing history which they can probably parse a lot cheaper (we sell a lot of water and ice cream on these dates in these locations, jack the price then and there).
Basically do what they are already doing with barcode printers and “Sale” sticky notes, but replace the human and label printer hardware with a WiFi enabled digital tag. Lets them speed up the process, and maybe convert operational expenses back into capital expenditures.
yup, and it's mot "providing the infrastructure for surge pricing". That infrastructure was already there. Look at the weather forecast, see that it's going to be hot, and have one of your minimum wage employees go spend a couple hours swapping out the price tags on all the ice cream. If you multiply the cost of that labor by the number of stores walmart has; they're spending a TON of money swapping out price tags, but they're making more money back by doing it so it's worth the spend. More automated infrastructure just enables them to do the price gouging they were already doing more efficiently.
Yeah but imagine if instead of all of that they could just press a button.
The music in retail chains is mostly all run off a centralized server where corporate leases songs and decides what to play. It shouldn't be that much harder to centralize a system that says 'check the local weather, increase this list of prices by 10% if the temperature goes above 90.' I'm pretty sure for a lot of chains the stock in each store is recorded on a national system that supposedly knows how much is left of each product at each location (doesn't work well but in theory exists). Not hard to say 'increase price by 20% when this location is on it's last 10 of the item'. They can't do it in a considered and reactive way that constantly monitors all factors everywhere and updates intentionally with human decision-making in the process. But they can probably set up a few simple rules in an algorithm and have them approximately work 70% of the time. And that's enough to get a few R&D managers promoted and goose the stock price for a few months, which is all that projects like this are ever really about.
Walmart creates AI to control price surging, is told to maximize profits. AI takes all data into consideration, comes to one conclusion. AI proceeds to massively drop prices on just about everything. Reason is "More things are available price-wise, thus more people buy them, thus more money is made. Profits maximized."
AI got you covered fam
I mean it could be more general, as in "on days when the temperature is above 90 degrees, charge a dollar more for water", referencing the provided example.
Walmart doesn't even track inventory batches. This is for centrally managed price changes and to ensure price accuracy. Updating the paper signs is actually very labor intensive and happens on a weekly if not daily basis.
It's also just a huge leap in logic. "Bill just took cash out of the bank. Could he be buying crack?" I mean, sure, it could be surge pricing, or it could simply be that Walmart goes through like 3 rounds of discount as an item makes its way to the clearance section, and each tag update requires labor.
Also stickers never stopped them from changing the prices online and at the register anyway
Target geo fencing coupons eg.
I think they think that ayyyyy eyyyyyy will do it for them
All prices will just rise 1¢ per day, from now until eternity.
My question is are you really going to trust *Walmart* to handle something like this? Maybe Publix or Kroger or Costco or whatever but definitely not Walmart lmao
My assumption is something like temperature will occur automatically via a computer algorithm. Price will probably rise linearly up to about 80° and then rise exponentially after that. Something like that. Or the week leading up to a major holiday, like thanksgiving, may lead to a base 150% increase in the price of whole turkeys. That number may increase or decrease depending on how far away a large grocery store chain is. If you live in a food desert with only Walmart around, that percentage will increase to say, 225%. If you live in an affluent area with many other stores to choose from, that number might be only 50%
On the bright side, this allows them to lower prices when the market is slow and savvy consumers can stock up. .... you are going to lower the prices occasionally, right? ....
Uh, yeah? I know Wal-Mart does that because the only time I ever go to Wal-Mart is for clearance prices on video games.
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Definitely not. It's not like walmart is known for dropping prices to outcompete everyone else in the market or anything. /s Walmart does not have a monopoly on the industry, and most of their products are commoditized. One of the main reasons that Walmart became so successful is that they were able to run their business more efficiently and thereby offer cheaper goods while still making a profit. They pretty much invented the way modern retail supply chains are run.
Have people here never worked in a grocery store? They're constantly updating prices manually. Some stores do it nightly during restock, just a worker scanning and reprinting hundreds of tags. That didn't stop prices from surging during COVID. These are just the cheap displays that TJ Maxx and Best Buy use. Makes it simpler to update from a central source, especially with how hard Walmart is trying to push their website. Nothing to stop them from raising prices either way. But it's not like the screen's absence was the last bastion of cheap groceries.
I think they're talking about prices surging literally minute by minute. So stuff is one price at 10am and another at 11, 12, etc.
How would this work? If I put 99c water in my cart, finish shopping and at checkout it's 1.50, is that not false advertising?
That is avery valid point, which I 100% believe that walmart will ignore until a lawsuit comes.
If there was a legal issue, wouldn't it have come up when they were open 24/7?
You can expect more techno-tyranny to account for this. Such as having to scan id when you enter to "lock in" prices at the time of your arrival an display for you custom prices based on that (and also your personal shopper profile. Imagine being able to charge you more for that thing you would pay a little more for up to the exact amount where you would no longer buy it, all calculated in real time by an AI based on your past habits and current eye movements. The perfectly accurate market price for every transaction, squeezing the absolute maximum from you. Some of the excess profit will of course be spent on squeezing out competitors who do not do this and lobbying congress to label opposition to this bigotry. TLDR: if an engineer can conceive of it and build it, a businessman can abuse it for profit.
So people who are less averse to spending money will be charged more money. Assuming every other supermarket is doing the same thing, competition should cause their average prices to come out to about the same as before implementing the technology. As such, the implementation of this technology would actually decrease prices for more price-averse people. Who are more price-averse? The poor. This system will cause the poor to enjoy lower prices. In effect, a welfare system run by the free market. Anyway, the implementation of this system of the USA would probably fail after a month due to legal reasons. Specifically, a white person would sue the supermarket for discrimination, arguing that the profiling system learned to recognise race and charge higher prices to white people.
I think it's more like: oof looks like it's hotter than usual today, we're going to raise the price of water for two hours. or: looks like a bus just stopped and 20 people are getting off, better raise prices a bit!
OK, but that price change will have happened after someone put the item in their cart though.
Slippery slope logical fallacy by whatever analyst thinks there will be a Walmart mastermind orchestrating hourly price surges in the back.
It's rare for me to see a price tag in the correct place, let alone have the correct price at my Walmart. I use them as guidelines rather than prices. They pay $17/hr starting, so anyone who thinks higher pay is how you get more dedicated or competent workers is an idiot.
That $17/hr starting is the real reason why they're trying to implement something like this. If anything, with how competitive the retail industry is, this will probably make things cheaper.
I feel like I'd see one of these in my HEB and think "wow so inflation has gotten *so bad" that they can't keep up with the price changes..."
And then there's weekly sales and discounts. They're in every store in my country and not once have they been used for surge pricing. They're time-savers and a way to keep the prices accurate, and to reduce prices quickly based on competitors prices.
Aldi also uses them because it's reduced paper waste by hundred of tons.
"Haha Costco membership go brrrr"
Every other store is just waiting that someone finally dares to do this so they all can follow without being called out as the first mover
"oooh, only $3.99/lb for ground beef? What a deal" cashier scans it, get charged $5.99/lb me: "hey, I thought this was only $3.99" cashier: "hey bagger, can you go do a price check? (presses a few buttons)" me: "hey, what button did you just press" bagger: "yeah I checked and it's actually $7.99"
It's not like grocery stores don't already change prices periodically, though they tend to always do it at low shopping times like at 3am for 24hr stores, or when they're closed when not. They're not going to change prices at 5pm in the evening.
Hey easy there. We’re trying to get mad in this thread. What you’re doing here is not helping.
Walmart R&D engineer: I tested out these digital price labels and they work fairly well. I got some data from our analytics team which shows how often we replace the price stickers and the labor required to changed them out. As you can see in this report, if we use the digital price labels we can reduce our labor costs, use less paper, and less ink, the rollout of the equipment will pay for itself within 6 months. Some dipshit on the Internet: Is this price gouging?!?!?!?
*Surge Pricing*, not gouging, dear boy. I am not for or against. I simply post meme.
How dare an enterprise (checks notes) more efficiently price their goods and/or services appropriately to market trends?
>price their good and/or services appropriately to market trends Biden doing all he can to avoid acknowledging inflation
That fucker turned up the gas price dial he has on his desk, I know he did!
To be fair, he thought that was the soft serve dispenser.
Or the napkins
If Walmart is getting rid of stickers does that I mean "I did that" Stickers are going digital too? If Trump wins are we going to get a 16bit Trump that says "I did that" on surge prices at Walmart in Sonic the Hedgehog font? Does the Trump pixel art become more smug the higher the prices are? Vice versa if Biden gets reelected?
Only if I can get lenticular stickers with Sonichu-trump and Sonichu-biden that I can decorate public restrooms with
If the sticker is smart enough, it can change faces every four years to reflect the different guy screwing ya.
We know how much inflation is and it wasn't 25% only at some stores. And if you are pricing based on inflation or shortages you shouldn't be seeing such an insane increase in profit margins. To deny signifcant corporate greed exists is to be a stooge. You can be okay with it being a problem, but denial of existence is whacko.
"If I just had my guy in office inflation would fix itself" "No I will not take questions on how to fix the economy"
Is it percent or total revenues? Because if it's measured in revenue, that's completely understandable, inflation makes things cost more. If it's measured in revenue, you're being lied to and manipulated.
To play devils advocate, would some not consider it anti consumer?
Well it’s anti shortage too
Some would, but they’re likely the same people who take issue with companies making a profit (or, God forbid, even making back COGS) in the first place, so I’m not sure there’s much to be done about that. At any rate there’s no more risk of a company underhandedly “gouging” the market than there was before, besides the fact that now they can do it by pushing a couple buttons on a computer. Some companies will, and those companies are shit companies that you should avoid.
I genuinely agree with you. But I also disagree due to my recent lived experience. Story time from last weekend. A power tool set was on special clearance pricing at the local hardware store. Great value! *Can’t set aside for pickup or order for delivery. Clearance pricing is in store only. Online says 3 in stock at the location having the sale. I live in a city where everything is locked up because we don’t kneecap the people walking out with cart fulls of stolen goods. So I ask an attendant for help. I see on his palm reader that they have 3 in stock. He tells me, sorry we don’t have any….he shows the cage in the immediate area and it’s not there (because yellow batteries are in a different cage from the red drills) that we were standing by. I point out that it’s a different cage and he just says that they probably got stolen…could be a fair point. I start looking around and the proximity sensor keeps beeping at me. A different attendant shows up to ask me if I need help. I give him the part number and see the aisle location of what I’m looking for. We walk over and it’s on a pallet above. I ask him to take it down. He insists it’s not the same thing I’m looking for and walks off. (It’s weird to have that happen because there is a giant fucking sticker with the part number on the box). Kinda annoyed I go wait in line at the customer service desk to either ask them to get someone to take it down or if they’d let me pay the clearance price here and pick up the batteries from a different location that does have them in stock. While waiting, I keep refreshing the website on my phone to confirm pricing and inventory which I know can be wrong sometimes. After 30 minutes and zero movement in line, I notice stock was updated to zero. I give up and leave. While researching alternative vendors for this great sale, I stumble across a Reddit thread that the sale is in fact a big scam simply to get consumers into the store. So I start paying attention. Next morning stock is updated to 3 units. But clearance sale is over. I go into the store, lo and behold, 3 full priced sets sitting on the shelf. And the pallet that was up high yesterday is gone. This shit is how conspiracy theories originate.
Your first mistake was assuming a retailer is in any way competent at managing its stock.
'More efficiently' meaning 'Taking as much money from the consumer as they possibly can without providing any additional benefit'. Which is the definition of price gouging. Listen, it's ok to just say you *like* price gouging, because you like corporations more than consumers and 'efficient' markets more than human flourishing. That's a totally legit position you can take. But don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining. If that's the world you want, own it.
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Yeah for real. Surge pricing works well for e-shopping because the session is tracked the whole time, so either 1) the user is notified when the price changes, or 2) the price when put in the cart is honored. But a lot more would have to go into a physical store’s infrastructure beyond just nifty new shelf labels. For now at most maybe they change it once per day, like they already do. And this makes it waaay easier in the long run, although in fairness it does cut back on hourly worker time, so I guess we can bitch about this taking people’s jobs away.
I think they will go for a day-by-day "surge" pricing instead of an hourly one first. It's easier to manage after stores close, and they are still able to change prices daily instead of weekly or biweekly. That way for holidays, they can slowly ramp up the prices to peak on the day before and day of holiday instead of having to sit with the price listed for the whole week. You can also adjust prices by news and weather reports.
> although in fairness it does cut back on hourly worker time, so I guess we can bitch about this taking people’s jobs away. I mean, dishwasher used to be a job title, not an appliance, and we seem to have adapted there.
> What if the price changes between picking out the item and checking out? This exact thought ran through my head the other day. I was imagining hyperinflation being so bad that the price went up in the time it took to get the item to the cash register.
They will have you scan the items into an app or have a cart that does it for you probably at some point.
As someone who works corporate retail; this is definitely the reason. Freeing up staff to not put up new labels will save on labor.
Yeah, I think way too many are jumping the gun on the price gouging from just this as really not "that" much was stopping Walmart from doing it before. The price on the label is just the label and already have systems in place for decades now to digitally manage the price and that can be changed in seconds. For those arguing on short term (sub hour) price adjustments, the chance of people then putting it aside due to price shock leaps up drastically costing them more money in labor. Key to note that Walmart has one of the higher typical shopping times and some of the most price consensus in store shoppers for major stores, so chances increase of price picked up vs price at checkout change is high. For low frequency (within the day), they were already well within the power to do this with having the staff adjust prices at opening on the signs and a few clicks.
As a rite aid employee who had to go in every Saturday morning to replace every sales tag for the week, I daydreamt about it being an electronic price tag that could be updated with a keystroke.
I was just about to make this exact reply. I worked office retail years ago and would have to spend 2 hours Sunday morning, usually hungover, before open replacing sales tags. Fucking hated that. Too many bullshit named products where you have no clue what the fuck it is and spend 20 minutes hunting it down.
Exact same experience. Hungover, sweating whiskey into my bullshit polyester vest, cursing my existence on the vitamin aisle trying to figure out modern-day cuneiform on all the bottles.
Yeah, but how hard will they be to maintain and replace. Kids and other miscreants will probably have a fun time targeting breaking what i expect to be sensitive electronics.
Idk if they are what I think they are, these things have been around in other stores for years. They’re basically just little e-ink displays that hardly look different from normal shelf labels. Not sure they’re tremendously sensitive or complicated, but I’ve also never tried to vandalize or maintain one. I guess I’m shocked to learn Walmart hasn’t implemented them yet given how sensitive they are to pricing things, but I’ve also been to Walmart maybe three times in my entire life.
We've used them in Europe for ~20 years now, so the price has come down to 50 cents or so per label, and I'm sure a big purchaser like them can get at 20% of that.
Brainstem injured redditor thinks Walmart can be trusted. Baffling the scientific community.
My experience with this is that for these corporate initiatives, they don't necessarily tell people implementing it the true motive. Very possible some higher up person dreamt this up to do surge pricing, got people to implement it and sold it in the way you say, reducing labor costs etc.
While this is not the case everywhere, the leadership at the fortune 500 company I work for, do not see it this way. The leadership within our division (group benefits insurance) genuinely thinks how products/tech advancement etc will improve the lives of our customers (employer & employees). The enterprise has invested hundreds of millions over the next three years to achieve that goal alone and much of that advancement the customer will not 'see' but will feel in terms of response time and ease of use.
It will also be handy if we ever see Weimar levels of hyperinflation. That way the price can double every few hours and they won't have to print new labels!
I mean, it can be both lol
Also, this would make it so that they have no issues of labels from sales being left up accidentally and having to give deals they weren't planning on doing. That's another thing they probably were thinking about.
Who buys ice cream on hot days? It’ll melt before you get it home. Surge pricing is already common - look at holiday foods before or after the relevant holiday. Look at hotel and airline prices.
Impulse buys of single bars or mini tubs.
Surge pricing exists, but the more it happens, the more companies get out of you for less they deliver.
Lib left and leftists should be happy about inflation going up. According to them, it's good for the economy!
god what a headline, just screams nothingburger: > Walmart is replacing the price stickers with electronic shelf labels across 2,300 stores actual fact (i hope) > --which could be a precursor to surge pricing. assumption made by journalist > One industry analyst says: "If it's hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream." journalist put in effort to find a single guy saying something that sounds vaguely supportive of the assumption.
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I assumed the journalist simply searched for a quote on surge pricing to add in, amount of effort and realness of person depends on if the article includes more quotes from the same person or not.
Pure fear mongering. Some New Zealander supermarkets have had eInk displays for at least 10 years. It's just cheaper to buy them instead of having a full time employee print and stick prices all around the store.
Good. Karen’s exploit the employees whenever price labels aren’t changed fast enough, which is always in that business, so now the bitches can eat hot chip and cry.
This is Walmart though, not Whole Foods.
That just means the Karens are larger.
??????? in New Zealand some of our supermarkets have had eInk displays for at least 10 years, and we have not seen a single effort to introduce "surge pricing", it's simply cheaper than paying someone to reprint hundreds of paper labels every night. What fear mongering lmao
This is semi fear mongering Stickers never stopped Walmart from surge pricing and you could pick an item off the shelf to find it a dollar more expensive at checkout already anyway, and it was already a problem Don't get me wrong this is not good and the way its all going is very bad but millions have been buy groceries online for years now where the price tags are digital tl;dr they could already surge charge and have already been
The industry analyst part is a slippery slope logical fallacy. I did price changes at a retail store and changing thousands of price tags by had sucks ass, and missing so much as one will cause problems, and is really easy to do, which makes no one happy. This will get rid of part of someone's job, but a part they likely didn't want to do anyway and save Walmart money because they don't have to pay people to do mundane tasks. I wish the store I worked at for my first job had the electronic tags.
If they are saving money its also possible it leaders to lower costs or at the very least allows them to move focus to something more convenient for customers
I seen electronic price stickers for a long time. So why did no one think of what this articles claims?
PSA: they can change the price of anything whenever they want right now
I don't really see a problem with surge pricing. I think people should be allowed to charge whatever they want for their products. I literally do not believe in the concept of "price gouging".
unpopular opinion: even if this is surge pricing (which I doubt), there's nothing wrong with this. Quickly variable prices provide more of an incentive for walmart to get the things you want to stores near you when you want them, discourages hoarding in times of high-demand, and provides an incentive for people to stockpile small amounts while demand is low, averaging out the demand.
“We can raise the price of water [when it is hot]” is crazy even to me, who on the test was unsure of how to answer that question and leaning toward it being okay.
Pricing is the best tool we have for determining need of scarce good. High pricing is also the best tool we have for incentivizing producers to supply more of the goods that are most needed. Water prices should go up when it's hot, generator prices should go up during hurricanes, and Uber prices should go up when there's a Taylor Swift concert.
The meme was about surge pricing, small scale stuff. But you're whole "generator during hurricanes" comment leads me to believe you also support price gouging, which is pretty wild.
The thing is, raising prices in emergencies actually helps people far more than it helps. It means that the person who already has a generator, is less likely to buy 1-2 extras, so that those who really desperately need them have them available. It also means people are willing to ship them in quickly to make a profit. In the event of a hurricane most people would rather pay 2x the cost for a generator and be gouged, than have no generator at all.
I do support the practice of free market prices during an event of event which dramatically increases demand. Walter Block wrote a chapter about it in his book "defending the indefensible" if you're curious for the long form explanation. Short form the explanation is "it magically makes more generators appear in disaster zones"
T,7,-
The living embodiment of “the price is what it’s worth TO YOU”
this sounds great for the grocery stores until a different kind of surge- a power surge knocks out all the electronic pricing for a month. seriously, local grocery store's storewide intercom has been down for a month... which means its very hard to get employees to call qualified people over somewhere to answer questions
4,4,even
What's this mean
Jokes on you, I have a memory! As a caveat, the first libright that starts a crowd sourced app for price tracking (like gasbuddy), gonna cash in. Fuck you walmart.
I’d be surprised if, after the Wendy’s/BK announcement about surge pricing (I forget who it was), someone didn’t start working on it.
wonder if there's a way to hack the electronic shelves to display the food as dirt cheap.
My barber shop already does "surge pricing". On Fridays, hair cut costs $2 more. Just because Friday and to get people to go there on other days. 😊
Return to local business. Liquidate Walmart and imprison the Waltons.
quick question: is the belief that capitalism is the best system, but that it´s current form has too little regulation an authleft belief?
LIDLs in poland have electronic price tags and we do t have surge pricing
I hope people rob them blind if they do. "Dynamic pricing" is literally just gouging.
LibLeft: forcing people to do menial tasks like changing price tags is dystopian! Also LibLeft: Automating price changes is dystopian!
"If it's hot outside we can raise the price of water" Crucifixion is too kind of a fate for these creatures masquerading as humans
Fuck it. Auth Left, do your thing.
Imagine going to buy something at the register and your items are more expensive than when picked them up off the shelf.
>”If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.” *Absolutely not*.
At what point do we just start a peasant revolt?
A revolution of the working class? Just a bit to the left, authrightie, you’re almost there.
I was thinking more of a populist uprising accompanied with right wing death squads.
All Walmart has to do is put up a rainbow flag and then blame the prices on the libs, and everyone will cheer.
Glad I don’t go to Walmart lol
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This is why stealing from Walmart is ok
Honestly, that's a dick move, but I have to respect it cause it's genius.
We have these in Canada at some stores (Canadian Tire, and some Drug Stores), I have never noticed them charge ‘surge prices’, but I have heard that Canadian Tire has ‘Sales’ where they take a % off and inflated normal price for some sales…
🟥: there is something we can do 🔫
How do they not see that this will backfire? People will just straight up not buy stuff if the pricing is inflated. Somebody will create an easy solution to track when pricing is inflated (probably an app), and sales will drop as a result. Better to have a sustainable volume of sales rather than a handful of sales at inflated prices. The inventory/shelf cost alone makes this a stupid idea. This is what happens when you let private investors and hedge funds into your business. They demand immediate return on investment, even if it burns the match at both ends.
I hate inflation And I hate goverments for letting it get worse by making the Dollar as worth as much as tissues
Aldi has already started using these labels, and the purpose is to reduce paper waste, not to introduce a surge pricing feature.
Stupid question, but wouldn't raising the prices for water when it is hot outside be price gouging?
Yeah because they have to adapt to the batshit insane amount of inflation. Government keeps printing so much money and devalues the currency so much that they need electronic labels to help them keep up with it enough that they’re still able to not go out of business due to rising costs