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  • Hacker News
  • Seattle really doing its best to confront every single strawman argument regarding the high price of groceries other than the obvious and true ones.
    by declan_roberts
  • True story #1: whenever we go on vacation, wife and I check rates for Uber and Lyft on both of our phones, and consistently we get different rates up to 15% delta.

    True story #2: I am eyeing a nice Seiko watch on Amazon, the price has been oscillating between $296 and $316. Whatever, thinking about waiting for black friday. Then the other day the price jumped to $350; weird.

    So, I switched to Firefox, used the VPN to a different US location, checked the watch and the very same watch was $316. It was surreal.

    Looking forward to hack it in a way that favors consumers.

    by SMAAART
  • Link to the bill: https://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=81665...
    by ortusdux
  • Has buying groceries online been normalized to this extent? I still feel dirty about it, but maybe I’m too old fashioned.
    by vadansky
  • I think a better solution would be to force retailers to submit accurate pricing information to price comparison aggregators preferably in real-time straight from their inventory system, and give consumers easy access to live price comparison data. If everyone knew how much your retailer is screwing with you, surveillance economy would cease to exist.
    by gorbachev
  • The devil is really in the details:

    > The bill also permits a vast array of discounting practices while requiring increased transparency around discounts and placing some limitations on how consumers can be profiled.

    The issue isn't "hey, you gave me a custom price that was disadvantageous". The issue is that "you gave me the regular price for some item but gave discounts to other people". That's trickier to outlaw because the "bad price" is the regular price, not a special discounted price.

    If businesses are behaving badly, what they're doing is setting high regular prices and then discounting items that they don't think you'd otherwise buy. For items that you buy all the time, they're giving you minimal or no discounts.

    But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.

    It's not especially clear to me that in the long run this is much better for consumers. They might get slightly more consumer surplus, but I doubt it will make that much of a difference. People in a given area probably have fairly similar buying patterns, plus they can still use loyalty programs, student/senior discounts/etc., as well as traditional coupons, to let customers sort themselves into "I'm generally price conscious" and "my time is worth more than my money".

    by apparent
  • Why is this limited to groceries? I don't want to pay a different price than others for any category of item, not just groceries.

    Should gyms be able to charge me more based on my weight? Should airlines charge me more because they know I need to travel urgently? Should pharmacies charge me more for medication because they know I have a chronic condition? Should an online retailer charge me more because my browsing history suggests I'm willing to pay a premium? Should insurance companies charge me more because they know I'm unlikely to shop around?

    by flowerlad
  • The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)

    This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.

    Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...

    by jsrozner

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