Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the US. (excludes department stores, drugstores, and general retail)
Kroger, which is considering a significant expansion through a $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons
Albertsons is the second largest supermarket chain in the US.
But seriously this will punish the salary rich but not the asset rich - the real type of rich.
And the benefit (other than corporate profits) would be? Aside that, prices varying according to gender and age sound like a lawsuit prime feature.
“Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf.”
Then in the next paragraph:
“EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer … quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag—a corporate profiteering capability that would be impossible using a mere paper price tag,” they wrote.
That's exactly dynamic pricing save that the driver is not external factors (weather, proximity to Thanksgiving) and the price is not universal. It's adjusting the displayed price of an item based on the identity of the person looking at it to target a specific price to an identified consumer. A very fine-grained value of 'dynamic'.
>Since its introduction in 2018, Kroger’s dynamic pricing strategy has expanded to 500 of its nearly 3,000 stores.
> Ms. Warren highlighted on social media how digital pricing could enable stores to implement surge pricing, such as increasing the cost of water or ice cream during hot weather or raising turkey prices before Thanksgiving.
The example from the article doesn't even require digital pricing. The weather is a fairly known event day-to-day and the calender even more-so.
As somebody who hoards way to many receipts; prices have been going up even at stores with paper prices (which is like all that I've ever seen).
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/buyer-beware-watchin... [2]: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/consumer-protection/prici....
- What happens when shopping is done by a delivery service? Does everything bought by a door-dasher get priced higher (because they might spend $5000/week at a store doing grocery runs) or lower (because their W-2 is lower?)
- What happens if I'm buy groceries for my grandmother? She's aged, has poor mobility, and on a fixed income. Are you going to charge me, and therefore her, more?
Delivery services let you add your loyalty/discount card to your account, which the shopper just scans off their phone and then pays with the service provided payment card. So they're still giving you your special pricing and still getting your data in return.
And that's assuming Kroger's in-house delivery service wasn't available. They obviously can do whatever they want with that.
