alt Hacker NewsI still don't understand how that would work. Yes, e-ink is great for updating prices, I welcome it at grocery stores.
But if both me and another person are standing in front of the prosciutto and cured meats fridge, we're seeing the same prices, even if I'm poor and they're rich.
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I think they're conflating/confusing a bunch of different things here. E-ink tags let stores run sales more often, offer "happy hour" time of day discounts, etc. It's not so much individualized (other than probably some demographic targeting, like raising prices 5-6 pm when well employed people are picking stuff up on the way home).
The personalized pricing is usually by having everyone pay through an app. The app knows your buying history and tracks everything you do so they can fine tune their deals for you, surfacing discounts on things that pull you into the store, running e-coupons when it knows you're price conscious, etc. etc.
Both systems are fair on the surface but exploit the asymmetry of billion dollar information systems vs the average consumer. All of these tweaks ensure they get the maximum amount of money that they can out of their customer base which means on average everyone ends up paying more, all while being very hard to point to exactly how you got screwed.
In my state there are laws requiring the price charged at the register to mark what's displayed on the shelf, with the store paying a penalty (price * some multiplier) to a customer who has been charged more than the displayed price. If the prices were constantly changing there would definitely be some people trying to game the system or suing because they feel the store had been doing something unfair. I can't see automatic price gouging working out in a physical store at all.
Just show a barcode. Scan to reveal your personal price. Maybe bundle it with coupons to make people accept it easier.
Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.
IME there usually isn't much contention looking at the same section of shelf. If I'm looking at the cured meats, I'm the only person looking at any shelves within 6ft either direction. Other nearby people are walking past, looking at shelves on the opposite side of the aisle, waiting for me to finish before checking the meats, etc. The algorithm doesn't have to optimize for literally every person/sale to still have a lot of impact.