> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.<p>While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.<p>To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Pricing will become increasingly adversarial. The Internet did too much to expose price differences to customers, so sellers are responding. Customers will need aggressive agents to price-shop on their behalf. Take hotel booking as one of the current nightmares of price visibility. Total price often isn't exposed until you show up at the hotel.
If stores raise their prices and cite this law as the reason why, that will fit with Maryland's overall theme as an eccessively exepensive state to live in.
That's called cartel pricing and its illegal.
Is it excessive? Expensive, certainly, but if I wanted cheap I'd go live in shack in the mountains.
This sounds crazy! Makes budgeting impossible! Imagine someone is on low income and doesn’t know how much the grocery shopping will cost! Whoever came up with this should be burned
Is haggling an individualized price? What's stopping companies from allowing arbitrary bids on any item they can choose to reject? What if the future of the grocery store is eBay, a true nightmare.
One thing about "surveillance pricing" I've not seen addressed is that it destroys the usual model of demand curve. A given buyer may be judged to have the resources to pay a particular (high) price for a good, but other factors may be relevant: that buyer might need to save on good A in order to buy more of good B. The "surveillance pricer" would demand a higher price for good A because it has no information about need for good B by the buyer.<p>That's a simplistic example, but we've been lectured about consumer choices, invisible hands of marketplaces, demand curves and marginal value for so long I'm genuinely shocked that ill-defined "predatory pricing" is the issue we see in the news.
Dude, this "surveillance pricing" is fucking bullshit. Good on them.
Just going to Aldi and shopping for yourself insulates you from this nonsense, no?<p>ETA: Aldi here is representing any store without a loyalty program
My mainstream supermarket in Nordics has for the longest time given individual coupons in their loyalty program.<p>There are three tiers of discount. There are general special offers, advertised widely, to get people through the door. Then there are members only discounts, advertised in store, to get people to be members. Then there are mailed to members personal discounts that are uncannily accurate for what is running out to get you to go shopping now instead of later. These days the hand scanners and apps also tell you what coupons you have so you don’t need mail but junk mail is still regular.<p>TBH as a shopper it works great.
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.<p>A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.
>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.<p>This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.<p>Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.
i really doubt the downsides of adding that layer of complexity can compete with the upsides of surveillance pricing.
FYI, I specifically mentioned Aldi because they <i>don't</i> have loyalty cards. I understand that might not have been clear to everyone, so I'll edit my comment to make it clear.
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
"The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs"."<p>This already happens. We've been getting personalized coupons from our local store for 15+ years now.
dirtbag egalitarianism wins again
This is so embarrassing. I can’t imagine being concerned about something so inconsequential. Just go to another grocery store.<p>Banning a pricing model should be unconstitutional
Forget high taxes and crime. Maryland is tackling the issues important to them: predatory pricing on Utz Crab Chips.
Maryland’s crime solutions are working, and have been for some time. It’s in metaphorical maintenance mode, rather than needing active development.
Typical HN webdevery, doesn’t understand that more than one thing can be done a time.