“When pressed, Instacart later admitted it does manage pricing for Target on its platform and runs pricing experiments to determine how much more it can charge on top of regular prices…”
This is why I wrote a few days ago that it is critical for people that are having a hard time affording food to never use a middleman to buy it.
When the economy is rough, the corporate sharks will feed.
Buy your food with cash in hand in the store. Otherwise you can be eaten.
unfortunately, that won’t necessarily prevent you from being price gouged. the stores themselves are algorithmically varying prices, so even with no middleman you can get screwed. (I remember Kroger was starting that a while back for example, they of course described it as targeted discounts).
obviously stuff like instacart etc. just add another layer of upcharge, so direct is cheaper in general
grocery stores use wireless price tags now that are synchronized to their price database. automated price gouging in-store
Most shops around me use eInk. Those tags probably cannot be used that way. They take a good minute to fully refresh.
Sometimes you’ll just see them flickering opposite colors.And there’s also the problem of applying this correctly at the checkout. Though perhaps you can get away with a lot of “mistakes”. The price tags in nearby BILLA in the pastry section are like… 5% accurate if you actually check the price tags. That is, if any are there in the first place.
Last time I went by the price tags by position I ended up checking out pistachio croissants as nougat ones. Screw it, that’s the price that was indicated. Then I just stopped taking items that didn’t match the text (pastry)/EAN (regular goods) on price tags (which I thought I wouldn’t need to check - like in every other shop where they are correctly placed), and would you look at that, barely anything is eligible.But I mostly stopped going there now. Random price tags, outdated price tags, price tags with actual price in ~2mm font that barely renders on the display sometimes with the member price in big bold, rotting and moldy fruit.
They will always try to commit the same crimes just with new technology and hope nobody notices. This is why they never want regulation of new technologies, so they have time to profit from commiting crime. Burn the entire disgusting fucking human race to ashe for all I care anymore
This ATTACK against Capitalism is TERRORISM!
-Trump’s Executive Orders!
Is this a new thing? Aglorithmic pricing has always been possible since the computer age began. It’s just now that people have gotten bold enough to try it.
