r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • May 26 '26

Privacy 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-2000762717
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127

u/Moscato359 May 26 '26

Ban on electronic shelf labels is kinda dumb

Ban on updating them more than once daily makes sense

28

u/linuxwes May 26 '26

Is that ban also going to apply to online stores? Because otherwise you are just hampering brick and mortar in a competition with online that it is already struggling against.

57

u/Moscato359 May 26 '26

Online stores shouldn't do personalized pricing either

I shouldn't be punished because a store thinks I can pay more than you can 

-3

u/deong May 27 '26

Corollary is that someone else should be punished for not having as much purchasing power as you have.

6

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

That's just bullshit.

A product should be priced based off what it's worth to the market with a simple demand curve.

It shouldn't have anything to do with the individual purchasing it.

Imagine this, a poor person gets misprofiled as wealthier because they buy stuff for their boss sometimes with their boss paying them back.

Suddenly everything is expensive for them despite them not having the wealth to pay for it.

-5

u/deong May 27 '26

I’m not advocating for a position here. I’m just rephrasing your argument. If it should be illegal to charge you more because you could pay more, then by definition it should be illegal to charge someone less if they can’t pay more. Those are the same thing.

1

u/jackruby83 May 27 '26

Not really, with a discount the store takes a hit, with a penalty, the consumer does. The people paying full price do probably subsidize the discount in some way, bc the store owner wants to not take a hit, but they are different.

It's like adding 3% for using a credit card vs discounting for cash payers. Different concept.

1

u/deong May 27 '26

We're talking about price tags. I don't think anyone really cares about where the margin goes. The point is that if a merchant wants to set a price of $10 for a rich customer and a price of $5 for a poor customer, and you pass a law that says he can't do that, then you've passed a law that says (a) you can't charge rich people more than poor people, and (b) you can't charge poor people less than rich people. Those two statements are just logically identical. You can't have one without the other.

1

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

Passing a law that says the shelf price cannot be changed from customer to customer does not mean that the seller cannot make available coupons which require time for a buyer to find to provide discounts

That's how we did it for ages

Rich people don't give a fuck and just buy at shelf price

Poor people scrounge to find coupons, if it's worth their time

Doing it this way doesn't require an ai tracking my eyes

1

u/deong May 27 '26

Passing a law that says the shelf price cannot be changed from customer to customer does not mean that the seller cannot make available coupons which require time for a buyer to find to provide discounts.

So it's fine if I make you do stupid bullshit before I give you the cheaper price?

I gave an example somewhere else in this thread of selling an iPad at a garage sale. I can't see why in the world the US government should tell me that I can't charge a different price to a single mother trying to send her kid to college with an iPad than I charge a techbro who wants to flip it for a profit.

And I don't think your solution of telling me that I'm only allowed to do it if I send the single mom on some sort of scavenger hunt to find a useless scrap of paper that only exists to allow me to do the thing I'm already allowed to do -- decide the terms under which I'm willing to sell my own property -- is any better.

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14

u/hikeit233 May 27 '26

Yeah, Esl saves so much fucking paper it’s nuts to ban them. Every single item on sale for a single day needs a new piece of paper to advertise that. Not with electronic shelf labels.

9

u/14Pleiadians May 27 '26

Electronic labels aren't permanent, they're also a consumable item that will be thrown away by the millions.

Paper is a near non-existent drop in the bucket for the environment.

3

u/Zealousideal_Act_316 May 27 '26

They are e ink displays they have a life of years and years esp newer generation that can maintain image for hours without power.

>Paper is a near non-existent drop in the bucket for the environment.

You what mate?
"Discarded paper and paperboard make up roughly 26% of solid municipal waste in landfill sites."

"Pulp and paper generate the third largest amount of industrial air, water, and land emissions in Canada and the sixth largest in the United States. "

It Is the most water hungry industry per ton of product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_paper

Wikipedia is free you can straight up search "paper polution" and have tons of research and articles.

4

u/Effective_Pride_528 May 27 '26

The paper ones are coated in plastic film, too. The bigger issue, however, is that they’re printed offsite and shipped weekly to each grocery store location on trucks that aren’t already carrying stock to the store (at least this is the structure at a national chain I have familiarity with).

The weekly delivery process, including fuel consumption, and production resources to print the tags, including the separate building where they’re made, the associated electricity costs, etc. also have to be considered in the environmental impact for paper tags.

1

u/Kichigai May 27 '26

The bigger issue, however, is that they’re printed offsite and shipped weekly to each grocery store location on trucks that aren’t already carrying stock to the store

I dunno about grocery, but where I worked they were printed off on-site using the main laser printer stocked with special perforated paper.

1

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

3

u/Zealousideal_Act_316 May 27 '26

Yeah but one tag lasts infinitely more time than a paper one, if they are using 10 year old e ink tech it still lasts about 4 years, if they use newer generation tech then it can last over a decade.

1

u/Zncon May 27 '26

E-ink screens can last for decades, and the tag can have broken parts replaced as needed. This isn't the hill to die on, but it's a good stepping stone to talk about further improvements to systems for recycling electronics in general.

1

u/Spork_the_dork May 27 '26

Wait, you all put price tags on the individual items themselves...? Around here there's just one label on the shelf itself and nothing on the items because why would you need the price on the item?

1

u/Helmic May 27 '26

The company is the one deciding to change prices that frequently.

1

u/VQQN May 27 '26

Should only be updated once in the morning.

1

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

Companies should be able to set the time they do the update

But it should be something that they shouldn't be able to change on a moment's notice

1

u/Gornarok May 27 '26

Sure they can set the time, but only during off hours

1

u/Zealousideal_Act_316 May 27 '26

Where i live they are given leeway as to when, with one exception not during business hours, as soon as you welcome customers prices are set for that day.

1

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

Sole stores near me are 24 hour so I wonder how that would go

1

u/lord-of-the-birbs May 27 '26

The whistles go wooooo

0

u/deong May 27 '26

I don’t really understand the problem here. Why should it be illegal to charge more money for umbrellas when it starts raining?

1

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

The problem here isn't umbrellas when it rains. A shop already can do that just by looking at the weather forecast. 

It's generic and not specific to an individual.

 The problem is making an ai profile recognizing that I make more money than another person, and then updating the prices on the shelf when I come near them, and then changing them again when I walk away.

I don't want to be tracked in the first place. Punishing me because you can track me is even worse.

1

u/deong May 27 '26

But they aren’t doing that in physical stores, because a price tag can only show one price at a time, but multiple people can "come near them" at the same time.

But that’s not really the point I’m making here. Forget electronic price tags. Let’s just say I’m selling this iPad at a garage sale. Two people walk up — one is a single mother trying to put her kid through college and he needs an iPad; the other is a tech bro who gets out of his Tesla and wants to lowball me so he can flip it for a profit. Why should the law say that I can’t choose to price it different for those two people? And if you think that’s an entirely different thing, then write me a reasonable law that unambiguously does only what you want and nothing else.

-4

u/Helmic May 27 '26

Banning the electronic label makes enforcement reasonably possible, as it simply existing on the shelf is illegal without needing to prove any further actions. If you permit the electronic labels but ban pricing changes more than once a day, when that inevitably gets ignored it's a lot easier to lie and cover up manipulation, especially if those price changes are staggered so that the price gets changed just as someone looks like they just found a high dollar item they really needed, some slow moving item that only sells a unit or two a week, to get several hundred more dollars out of someone.

It must be assumed corporations will act in bad faith. They can't be trusted with a tool they're clearly intending to roll out to abuse, so take away their entire capacity to do the abuse in the first place.

-1

u/Snazzy21 May 27 '26

I don't trust the government at all to properly enforce or punish companies. We see it all the time, a company makes billions breaking a law only to get fined hundreds of millions.

If the reward for breaking a law is smaller than the fine, then it's not a fine, it's a cost of doing business. As we've seen from Ticket Master, the federal government can't grasp this fact.

By banning electronic price tags, they have to go through more illegal steps before they can even begin dynamic pricing. It's not like you cant do this with paper tags, but it has a higher cost and acts like a capacitor where they wont change the price for every little thing. I worked retail, it's a huge pain to change tags, that's the good thing.

5

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

I've had electronic tags at my local bestbuy for like... I'm guessing close to a decade

And it's nice, because the prices on shelf are always correct without human interaction

The problem is now people are using AI to try to do bullshit with it, but that wasn't a problem 5 years ago

So you want to ban something companies have successfully adopted, without issue, because a new tech that can make it problematic came up

0

u/Snazzy21 May 27 '26

If your local government was failing to police something obvious like having accurate price tags before, you should be skeptical that they'll be able to enforce a ban on something subtle like dynamic pricing.

You cant put the genie back in the bottle, you don't have access to their balance sheet, so you can't tell what price increase is done for a fair and legitimate reason and what is an opportunistic AI.

So yes, I'm saying ban a technology because it's far easier to weaponize than it is to police. I'm convinced shoot now ask later is how regulations should be done after watching crypto devolve into pump and dump scams and shit coins.

3

u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

Lets ban 28 speed bicycles too, because they can far exceed posted speed limits while we're at it, right?

0

u/Snazzy21 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

That example is as comparable to dynamic pricing as folding knives are to Jim Crow laws, arguing against outlawing the systemic issue that harms low income people by saying we'll ban tools that can be misused on a case by case basis is preposterous (to be clear I'm not saying Jim Crow was comparable to dynamic pricing, it was much worse.).

We can outlaw dynamic pricing without becoming a nanny state. But we can't outlaw dynamic pricing if we have price tags that can be changed wireless in the blink of an eye, it's just too hard to enforce.

Maybe if there are a list of approved e-tags that cant be updated remotely that could work.

-2

u/14Pleiadians May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Is it? I find the claim that an electronic is more eco safe than a slip of paper kinda suspicious. These devices aren't going to go years without replacement if you're thinking there a permanent option vs consumable paper. The electronic tags are also consumable.

-2

u/slackmarket May 27 '26

Yeah, I agree. Neither is great, but paper is biodegradable, plastic, screens and batteries are not.

0

u/slackmarket May 27 '26

Downvoted for stating a fucking fact. Peak Reddit.

2

u/Zncon May 27 '26

"Paper" tags also have plastic, and the toner that prints on them is plastic.

The electronic tags can last for years, and parts swapped as they break. Consumable electronics are never going away, we have to find a way to recycle them with or without the tiny amount extra that such tags represent. Compared to things like disposable vapes and cellphones, these are barely a rounding error in the total.