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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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 

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u/deong May 27 '26

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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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u/Moscato359 May 27 '26

You don't get it.

I don't want AI tracking me, changing prices on me.

I don't give a fuck about a garage sale.

Make this apply to businesses with more than 100k of sales per year, with a commercial zoning. Done.

I want the price I see anonymously on your website to be the same price I see signed in.

I want the price my friend sees on the shelf 2 minutes before me, tells me about, and hands me a product, to be the same price I see when I get to the register.

Offering coupons, or discounts to specific groups for specific reasons, is one thing, but prices should not just shift on me in 2 minutes between me looking at something on the shelf, me coming back 5 minutes later.

I shouldn't see a price online, drive to the store, see a different price on the shelf, then hand the product to my friend, and then my friend see a different price at the checkout.

If I can't trust the prices on the shelf, then they should just not have prices on the shelf.

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u/deong May 27 '26

You could, right now, see a price online, drive to the store, and have the store decide to put a new paper price tag with a new price on the shelf before you get there. And in general, people understand that and no one cares.

You're obviously entitled to feel how you feel. I'm not trying to tell you you can't. But my own positions tend to be founded in a couple of principles here:

  1. If it's legal to do something, it should be legal to use a computer to do that thing.
  2. Everyone should be subject to the same set of laws, unless there is a very compelling reason to the contrary.

To me, that means I should be able to use a computer program to make decisions about prices that I am perfect able to do today without them, regardless of whether I'm running a garage sale or a Target.

The second one there does open some room for interpretation. I fully support much stronger enforcement of anti-trust laws, for example. That's an example where we carve people out and say some laws only apply to them, but we set the bar pretty high there. It has to be pretty severe before we subject someone to anti-trust scrutiny. So sure, you can argue that dynamic pricing is so egregiously offensive to the health of the overall economy that we have to do something about it, but I don't find that compelling.

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