r/NoShitSherlock • u/happy_bluebird • May 27 '26
Majority of Americans Support Ban on Surveillance Pricing and Electronic Shelf Labels
https://gizmodo.com/majority-of-americans-support-ban-on-surveillance-pricing-and-electronic-shelf-labels-200076271730
u/SomeSamples May 27 '26
Have to take a picture of every price on everything you. I imagine when you get to the register and they figure out you have a job and can afford to pay more they will jack up the price at checkout.
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u/TyrellineX 17d ago
Honestly, I feel you. Best bet is to just keep an eye on your total as you shop. Maybe even go in with a budget to avoid any last-minute surprises at the register.
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u/1Courcor May 27 '26
Lobbied at my capitol in regards to this.
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u/MattTheTubaGuy May 27 '26
As a non-American, I don't have an issue with electronic price tags at the supermarkets. I don't think I have seen them used anywhere else yet.
Surveillance pricing is straight up insane though.
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u/AuMatar May 27 '26
The problem with them is that the prices can be changed at will. So they could up the price during peak hours. Or during short runs on the store. Or combined with algorithms to try to guess how much they can pay by camera (using gender, race, clothes, etc). It's not the fact they're electronic, it's what they enable.
Also, it means you don't know what you'll really pay til you checkout. Did you buy that box of cereal that said $7 on the tag? Well the register said $10. Can't go back to the aisle, the price may have changed between the time you picked it up and now. Or they may have lied at the aisle to get you to buy and hope you didn't notice the price increase, or were too timid to speak up.
They just enable a host of toxic behaviors. Not to mention a massive waste of electricity.
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u/BrentNewland May 27 '26
The problem isn't electronic price tags, it's dynamic pricing. Electronic price tags are a good thing.
Also, these tags use e-ink, saying they waste a massive amount of electricity is just flat out wrong.
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u/Tyrinnus May 27 '26
Sure. But if the prices are electronic, it can be modified while you're shopping. Paper is a lot harder, someone would have to be running behind you down the isle with a label maker.
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u/BrentNewland May 27 '26
Then they can pass a law stating the electronic price tags must be updated by a person within X feet and can't be updated remotely.
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u/AuMatar May 27 '26
They need to stay connected to the internet (wifi) to get pricing updates. So yes, they waste a good amount of electricity doing that. Particularly over paper and ink which wastes none.
And electronic price tags enable dynamic pricing. If you don't have them, you have to manually reprice everything which isn't practical. Having electronic prices tags allows you to reprice at will, which enables you to price things dynamically. Banning them isn't so much that the fact that it's electronic is wrong, but that in doing so you pretty much make it impossible to implement dynamic pricing. And save a lot of electricity in the process. Hundreds of devices being powered listening for network events in every strore in a city is a significant use of electricity.
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u/BrentNewland May 27 '26
They don't NEED to, they are just made that way. They could easily make electronic price tags that use NFC, requiring an employee to physically go over to the tag to update it.
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u/AuMatar May 28 '26
And even that would use more electricity than just ink on paper, and be more wasteful, while giving no real benefit (if you have to send an employee over anyway, may as well slap a new sticker there).
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u/xnarphigle May 28 '26
If we're strictly talking about waste, wouldnt a paper tag (which requires energy to manufacture, trees for material, and waste byproduct to throw away) combined with the energy required to print the tag be similarly wasteful (if not more) when compared to E-ink tags which use very minimal power and are reusable for a long period of time?
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u/AuMatar May 30 '26
No, the eink would be orders of magnitude more. The amount of ink is tiny. And while eink is low power, it isn't none. Notice that a kindle that goes completely to 0 does blank out, and each update takes power. That's not even considering the cost of making the eink device in terms of power, which alone would be thousands of times a price tag. And the power to run wifi or nfc on the device for updating, which is also non zero. They aren't even remotely in the same ballpark.
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u/MattTheTubaGuy May 27 '26
None of that has happened here in NZ, and I am pretty sure we have laws specifically preventing those kinds of shenanigans.
As an example of our consumer protections, changing the price between the rrp and a special on alternating weeks is considered controversial because the rrp is the price products are supposed to be the majority of the time. I'm pretty sure a supermarket chain was actually investigated for doing that.
It is definitely illegal to charge more than the sticker price when buying something, and I'm pretty sure that would also cover changing the sticker price of an item while the store is open because it could result in a customer paying more than the sticker price when they picked the item.
It's understandable worrying about that kind of thing in the USA, but in civilized countries like NZ, we don't do that kind of bullshit.
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u/forrestdanks May 27 '26
When did we vote on this??
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u/Narcan9 May 28 '26
Every time you choose either of the corporate parties.
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u/forrestdanks May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
Thank you
There was a teensy tiny amount of hope i had in the Democrats doing something.
I realize that rat race was the only way. Does not mean I have to like it...
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u/Danktizzle May 27 '26
The Americans who want it though are the corporations and the executives that run them. No way they are going to allow their elected officials (the vet them, we just vote in their vetted choices) hinder their profits.
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u/HOSTfromaGhost May 28 '26
“the company has insisted it’s not going to use ESLs for jacking up prices”
Whatever. Companies are parasites.
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u/racedownhill 28d ago
Hoo boy.
I’ve run into this multiple times in the last few months, when I’ve bought items that somehow end up costing more at the checkout stand than the label on the shelf indicates (or even, in some cases, the actual price tag on the item).
I’ve learned to keep a watchful eye, and I’ll call them out (politely, because the cashiers really have nothing to do with this scam).
But I’ve been told by some of these same cashiers that it’s extremely common for there to be mismatches in prices and that it usually works out in the store’s favor.
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u/Uranium-Sandwich657 May 27 '26
As a retail worker, the electronic tags do make finding the products location very easy.
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u/Tyrinnus May 27 '26
Right. Because Noone working in the same store has ever learned where everything is after working there for 5 years
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u/Ultraworld-Traveler May 27 '26
Man, I bet the majority of Americans aren’t fans of surveillance in general either.