U.K. Aldi do this as well.
Aldi does it in
, too. It always seemed like something to help them keep the store running while chronically understaffing.
Real time price and spending behaviour monitoring?
What’s that thing about capitalism laying the foundation for planned economies? I think it was Lenin
Can we have Cybersyn??
No we have Cybersyn at home.
Cybersyn at home:
I’m not skilled enough for a thorough analysis but I bet it would be interesting to look at Wal-Mart’s rise to dominance through that lens. One of their big things was capturing and analyzing sales data, and using that to inform planning. Of course we know who that ultimately benefited.
Reminder that these labels, like those awful TV screens on grocery store freezers are expensive and delicate.
I wouldn’t put it past them to eventually do surge pricing, but changing prices is pretty easy without these(and knowing what to surge is easy, that is basically the whole christmas season, halloween season, thanksgiving, summer… you see my point). A big part of how these are used is for online shopping and the “uber drivers of shopping” as these have flashing lights that they can basically follow. I suspect it will probably used (along with other automation and restructuring) as an excuse have less employees and basically turn it into a gig job while any theoretically slightly easier surge pricing is realistically not a major factor.
I think the distinction is going to be the frequency with which they can change prices. They can change dozens of times throughout the day or even based on who is walking past them since they’re using facial recognition to track everyone in their stores anyway.
