this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
121 points (90.1% liked)
Technology
59421 readers
4793 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not only that but they can identify you by your cell phone and see if you are a high income person or big spender, and change the prices as you walk down the aisles.
More than that. They have your frequent shopper card and your online purchase history and everything else they've aggregated together. They know at what prices you purchase things, they know how much you shop around, they know the days of the week and times of day your more likely to make an impulse purchase. It's lunch on Tuesday and your favorite snack suddenly costs five cents more because they're moving the Overton window on your price points. It's after work Friday and suddenly everything costs 10% more because they know it's the end of the week and you're tired and aren't going to go to another store.
There's not really a way to do that with this technology. These are just price tags on the shelf, so if they changed the price it would change it for everyone in the store.
This is not precisely accurate. These are individually addressible and can be commanded to change what's displayed based on any arbitrary input, such as detection of a critical mass of apple products in that part of the store, or a device which is signed into a store account on the store app, accurate down to about 3 meters last time I looked at the state of presence analytics tech. So you absolutely could have 20% higher prices follow a person around a store if you wanted to.
But you don't carry the sign with you. It stays at the shelf. Sure, they could build a system that tracks you everywhere in the store and marks what price they showed you and tells the register what price to display when you check out. They'll try all that, but this won't do it yet.
With that technology, no. But retailers track where you are in their stores. And even if you don't bring your phone with you, they're using facial recognition technology and will eventually try working with that.
So they probably have a good idea who you are. And they also have your purchase history - what you bought and at what price you bought it. They have your frequent shopper card history, your online purchases, everything they've put together from data aggregators.
They have all the pieces: they can track you in the store, they know the prices you're willing to pay for things, and they can change the price as you walk down the aisle. Do you seriously think someone isn't going to start putting all that together?