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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Funny you should bring this up, I just thought about it today what a terrible development those electronic price tags are from a consumer perspective. Because of course the next step is constantly changing the prices based on customer data telling them how to extract the maximum amount of cash from shoppers. Which is what I noticed at stores where they do have them, in extreme cases they change the prices of some products multiple times a day.

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Wait until they change price as you approach the shelf. Maybe put that phone in airplane mode when you shop.

My neighbor is quoted substantially lower prices on the same car sharing app as me, for the exact same cars. I don't know if it's the sole reason but she has a really old smartphone. Actually surprised me she can even still run the app on it.

The phone is maybe possibly part of it but most of actuarial calculations for car rentals are more based around age/zip code/sex and whatever driving history they can find on you than anything else.

Such price tags have the potential to enable pricing strategies that are massively beneficial to society, consumers included.

Consider products that have their price automatically decline as they approach their expiry. Huge amounts of food would avoid wastage.

Meanwhile in real world, the local grocery store can't even notice when products on their shelves have already expired. Sometimes by quite a long while. Not going to hold my breath for that one.

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