This violates an absolute necessity for a market to qualify as a free market, imo. In order to have a free market, the consumer needs to have access to enough information to make an informed choice (which is why healthcare can’t be a free market, but I digress). If I can’t even know what the price of a bunch of bananas is going to be, I just have to YOLO it at the register and hope the AI didn’t wig the fuck out because of a flash stock market crash or something and mark them up 100,000x between the shelf and the register, it’s hard to argue the case for that being a free market. I guess it still technically is, because I could always just say “take the bananas off, please” at the register, but I’m sure these geniuses will come up with something to try and prevent that.
To those who say they wouldn’t shop there, there’s a lot of folks who don’t have a lot of choice in grocers; there’s plenty enough towns and communities that have just one (or none, and you just have to drive, if you can afford a car, or else go wherever your massively insufficient local transit system will take you). I wouldn’t choose to shop at a store that did this, but then I also have that privilege. I also think another big question to ask is what happens if the big grocery chains collude to more or less implement this together?
I lived in Appalachia, Walmart was about twenty minutes a way, the next closest grocery store of any real size was a solid hour away. I fucking hated that I had to shop there but at least their self checkout didn’t have scales so “discounts” were common.
This violates an absolute necessity for a market to qualify as a free market, imo. In order to have a free market, the consumer needs to have access to enough information to make an informed choice (which is why healthcare can’t be a free market, but I digress). If I can’t even know what the price of a bunch of bananas is going to be, I just have to YOLO it at the register and hope the AI didn’t wig the fuck out because of a flash stock market crash or something and mark them up 100,000x between the shelf and the register, it’s hard to argue the case for that being a free market. I guess it still technically is, because I could always just say “take the bananas off, please” at the register, but I’m sure these geniuses will come up with something to try and prevent that.
To those who say they wouldn’t shop there, there’s a lot of folks who don’t have a lot of choice in grocers; there’s plenty enough towns and communities that have just one (or none, and you just have to drive, if you can afford a car, or else go wherever your massively insufficient local transit system will take you). I wouldn’t choose to shop at a store that did this, but then I also have that privilege. I also think another big question to ask is what happens if the big grocery chains collude to more or less implement this together?
I can’t believe voters didn’t like me
I lived in Appalachia, Walmart was about twenty minutes a way, the next closest grocery store of any real size was a solid hour away. I fucking hated that I had to shop there but at least their self checkout didn’t have scales so “discounts” were common.