this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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They don't currently, but they could.
Take brand x on the shelf. Sold for $5 at a profit of $1. They sell 10 per week. You buy 2 if those every week, on Wednesday at about 6pm. Why not make them $5.50 next Wednesday and see what happens. Normal price on other days as no pattern identified.
Then once that's successful, why not have beacons detecting your phone, or even the stores app feeding your location. Then they can update just for the hours you are there.
Oh, but you'll say you swore it said $5 when you picked it off the shelf. The worker will say they have to charge what's there now and what it scanned as. Your choice to purchase it or go look for something else.
They've already started all this crap with online purchasing. It's just moving it to retail.
Surge pricing really only works when you put the customer in isolation. Uber can do it because you're the only one seeing the rate for the trip you want to take. Amazon can do it because you're shopping while taking a shit at work. Nobody else sees the prices in your online shopping cart, that's not the case in retail.
The profit motive behind these tags is wage savings. It saves in the time it takes to change out price tags when the prices do change. It saves in the time used in finding and replacing missing or damaged tags. It saves in the amount of manual price corrections at the till when the tag doesn't match the till because the tag wasn't updated - or the lost time and revenue if someone abandons their cart because of said disagreement.
Could they do what you're saying? Technologically speaking, it's been possible for several years - we've had these tags on most major store shelves in Canada for a very long time now and apps tracking our every move. Why hasn't it happened already? These stores have had everything they need to implement this scheme, and of all the shady cunts in this world, Galen Weston would have by now if it could have turned a profit.
It's easier to just price-fix the bread and pay a fraction of your profit in lawsuit settlements decades later than to do what you're describing.
I a shop with 10 products, yes, I'd agree. In a supermarket with thousands of products, they can predict what you're likely to buy if you're a regular customer and you might be the only one buying those items that day.
I don't expect them to do it overnight. First they roll them out for the cost savings. Just like they did with barcodes rather than price labels. Then they start to look at other savings or profit centres.
After a while it becomes, why wouldn't they do it?
The industry calls this “clientelling”