This was on the news a lot today where Walmart has recently announced that they will be using digital store tags for their products which should mean no more need to have people manually changing prices as you could theoretically change prices at an instant. This generated some controversy with the topic on how this will eliminate jobs. But one of the fascinating things to think about is how people were discussing the topic where the company could have an AI system simply do all the price updating. We aren’t just talking about adjusting prices to match the new weekly sales, but instead imagine the bot adjusting prices in real-time due to things like supply and demand.
People were then wondering if that means you could literally walk into the store with the intent to purchase an item at a given price that is in-front of you only for it to change once you grab the item. That would raise a lot of legal issues I would imagine. It seems very probable that one could shop around filling up their carts only to find out during checkout that everything got more expensive. It made people so worried that some places were thinking of creating laws to stop stores from using these systems.
Funny enough, there are a lot of large supermarkets here that already use these digital price tags. I never even thought of that price changing possibility in the future. That must make disputing price errors harder as even if one shows a cell phone picture the store can now argue that’s not the price that is listed on the shelf. Will be interesting to see how this plays out legally.