Instacart's AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill

Posted by pseudalopex 1 day ago

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Comment by pseudalopex 1 day ago

> A Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative investigation found that some grocery prices differed by as much as 23 percent per item from one Instacart customer to the next.

And this may expand to physical shopping.

> Until recently, the Carrot Tags website informed prospective retailer customers that the technology could be used to test prices on in-store customers. “Fully unlock the potential of ESLs’ instant and accurate pricing changes with dynamic price and promotion optimization strategies at the shelf,” the site said.

There is a video for people who would prefer it.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxr7xSxsGo

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by 4d4m 1 day ago

Call your senator. Surveillance pricing should be illegal.

Comment by Terr_ 1 day ago

Or, at a bare minimum, occurrences must be disclosed, otherwise they're basically defrauding the customer.

Secret pricing also destroys any semblance of efficient markets, so any ardent (but honest) free-marketeers should be against it too.

Comment by Jblx2 23 hours ago

Aren't coupons the standard age-old price discrimination method?

Comment by Terr_ 21 hours ago

At least in the scope of living memory, sure, but the key is that the prices are not secret, personalized, or—even worse—both secret and personalized.

Comment by Jblx2 4 hours ago

How sure are we that "digital" coupons aren't personalized? And even printed coupons in mailers could have been customized. To a personal level, or to a neighbor hood, or zip code level. If Instagram had sent out individualized coupons, would that be better?

Comment by nja 1 day ago

If only calling "representatives" still worked nowadays in the age of blatant corporate lobbying... it's really hard not to completely despair, because is there _anything_ we peons can do?

(I used to call my senators and house reps about things, but it never got more than a polite "thanks, but I don't care" and now they don't even bother to reply at all)

Comment by fzeroracer 1 day ago

I think this is a great example of how even in a 'free market' the notion of price transparency is easily cheated and results in behavior that is clearly anti-consumer. Much like how the push for algorithmic pricing has resulted in cartel-like behavior for apartments, we should view this the same way.

It's all so very tiresome, especially because you have to use whatever shitty app grocery stores foist upon you and/or give up your personal data in order to get the real prices on products. There were multiple times I noticed where I was being shared 1.5x to 2x for the same goods simply because I refused to give up my personal data, and eventually I relented because I needed to save the money.