Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have smaller margins and more options compared to pretty much any industry, yet politicians seem to think they are the cause of all of our ills.
Grocery stores have tiny margins and that's great. Let's keep it that way, it benefits all consumers. One way to prevent them from expanding their margins is to ban so-called "dynamic pricing".
This is hilariously first-order-effects thinking...
If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
Dynamic pricing on personal data is bad I think, but temporal dynamic pricing is actually very good for everyone and I hope it doesn't get thrown out by some reckless legislation-writing.
That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.
I don't see why consumers wouldn't just pick the stores that have better prices for them. Why would they know/care/need to know what the prices are doing for other people?
> If any store used dynamic pricing to expand their margins, the others would just do the same and compete away those margins once again, with the marginal gain being handed back to consumers.
How would you do it if pricing is dynamic and changes every day?
By the time competitor finds out about the price, you might have already reduced it, making it look like theirs is more expensive even after they applied discount.
Because the exact same is true in reverse
Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).
Your evil case is not evil
The point of pricing water to that level is that it would induce other people who have access to bottled water to bring it to that market, as is desirable
Al major chains in my area use Covid/etc to increase prices beyond what supply dictates to profit off of crises, except for king soopers.
https://qz.com/supermarket-prices-grocery-food-inflation-pan...
It’s just pandering to voters who don’t know better. See: price of eggs in the last election.
Rent control is the canonical populist price control. That one's evergreen. Egg-prices-by-fiat are just a fad!
With both parties scrambling to buy non-taxpayer votes with taxpayer money, the list is endless. Free healthcare, free tuition, pork barrel spending, wars on behalf of other nations, lavish benefits for your ethnic group’s immigrants, etc.
You believe that poor people don't 'pay taxes', even though all of their money and excess labor value is definitionally recirculated into the economy or back to the government?
You believe in the world's most expensive healthcare, the world's most expensive universities(/hedge funds), corrupt spending on corporations, wars on behalf of the empire, and our vassal states, and 'lavish' benefits for only corporations and white people (as has been the case since we invented whiteness)?
Am I correctly understanding that this status quo is your preference?
I'm also curious which benefit is specifically 'lavish'. The only social programs I'd describe as such are the programs that create billionaires.
Or do you just think that politicians shouldn't talk about rent, fuel, and food prices?
Or is your contention that the working poor just stupid for believing anything will ever get better in our two party system?
I mean it's very likely the MAGAcult literally just writes checks to people with Dear Leader's face/signature on them going into the midterms.
That seems bad.
[flagged]
What could possibly go wrong?
I think that opaque pricing is bad in that it creates a feeling of helplessness in the customer, is annoying and after every deal it makes you feel like you have been ripped off. Like the - call us to get a quote on some sites instead of direct pricing.
To a lesser extent it is the same with loyalty programs - my grocery stores often discount items to 50% and on my receipt it there is usually something like - you saved 20 Euro - which could be 20 to 30% of the bill. A lesser mind than the average consumer's may suspect that they keep all the prices permanently inflated by 20 to 30% and if some schmuck dare to buy their favorite cheese when not discounted - it is on them.
This is the answer.
I'm always shocked at how much anti-capitalism and anti-competition there is in the US.
I was taught that the power of consumer choice could reign in markets, but when I look around I see more and more companies working harder and harder to make themselves completely insulated from consumer choice.
Now our darlings are companies that are like massive prisons that promise that everyone will be interned in in the future.
Keep in mind: the only thing a capitalist fears is a truly free market.
The highest ROI for any business is to buy their own politician. That allows you to block competition and other inconveniences at a legislative level.
No, grocery stores will be the weakest entry point to have the customer get used to get individual pricing. It's not the store owners themselves but big data businesses who do the pricing for them. Essentially taking the freedom away from the shops even further while at the same time squeezing even more money out of customers. This totally distorts supply and demand.
There is no way Walmart or Target or whoever is giving up their gold dust to some nameless SaaS for pricing. They will do it in-house. Never mind the fact that a similar aggregation attempt for the property rental market was considered actionable by the DoJ already.